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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

coffee cups

Initiative Backed by Starbucks, McDonald’s Begins Testing Waste-Free Cups in the Bay Area

As a planet we produce the astounding 264 billion paper cups per year. Some of them are recyclable, some aren’t — but no matter their label, the vast majority end up in landfills because of an inner plastic inner lining which make the cups tricky to actually recycle.

That overwhelming amounts of coffee cup waste is the target of the NextGen Cup Challenge, a global competition to create a scalable zero waste cup solution. It’s the first project from the NextGen Consortium, an initiative aimed at reducing food packaging waste that’s managed by Closed Loop Partners as well as big-name food corporations like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and others (h/t Nation’s Restaurant News).

The 12 winners of the NextGen Cup Challenge were selected last year, and this week they’re beginning to roll out their cup solutions in participating cafés in the Bay Area. In San Francisco and Paolo Alto, coffee shops will be testing out reusable cups tricked out with chips and tracking codes. Once they’re done with their drink, customers can return their smart cup to any participating café or other designated drop off points. After that, NextGen will collect and sanitize the cups, then re-send them back out into circulation. San Francisco shops will use cups designed by Indonesia-based returnable packing service Muuse, and those in Paolo Alto will feature cups made by British startup CupClub.

In March, cafés in Oakland will start piloting their own waste-free cup solution. Instead of reusable cups, participating cafés will use fully recyclable single-use cups — that is, cups that don’t have pesky plastic liners, which sometimes make other “recyclable” cups difficult to actually, well, recycle.

Even though big chains aren’t using sustainable cups yet, this a still big step for the NextGen Cup Challenge. Launching in small, local cafés is an important proof of concept, as well as an opportunity to see which type of waste-free cup is the easiest to implement and most popular with consumers. The end goal is to roll out the most successful solution on a large scale — to national chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks.

NextGen Cup Challenge isn’t the only group out there fighting coffee cup waste. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, Nestle-owned chain Blue Bottle is also testing a zero-single-use-cup program (featuring reusable cups) as part of their initiative to go waste-free by the end of this year.

Back in January, my colleague Jenn Marston predicted that 2020 could well be the year of the waste-free coffee shop. With NextGen Cup Challenge, a project backed by industry giants, finally starting to take off, there’s a chance that might actually happen.

Would You Rent (and Return) a Coffee Mug to Reduce Waste?

At most coffee shops, if you bring in a reusable mug you might get a 10% discount on your mocha, or just a pat on the back. But Vessel Works is upping the ante: today the company launched a beta program in two cafés in Boulder, Colorado, which lets people rent a reusable stainless steel mug for free from their local café (h/t Fastcompany). “Think bike sharing or a library book but for to-go mugs,” states their website.

Customers can use a free app to rent a Vessel mug, after which they’ll have five days to return it to one of Vessel’s drop-off kiosks or at any participating café. As they walk around sipping from their rented mugs, people will get reports on their app about how much waste they’re preventing, how much water they’re saving, and how they’re reducing their carbon footprint.

If they go over that time, they’ll be charged for it: $15 for an unreturned mug, $2 for a mug top. The website doesn’t indicate exactly how the company tracks the mugs, but I’m guessing each mug is either fitted with an RFID tag or a QR code that customers scan before they start drinking and scan again when they drop it off.

Cafés pay ten cents per Vessel mug, which, according to an interview with the founder, shakes out to less than constantly restocking paper cups, at least for a relatively small-volume spot. Vessel also picks up and cleans all the mugs at its own commercial facility before returning them — café partners don’t have to do any of the work.

Across the pond, CupClub is doing something very similar. Here’s how Jenn Marston described the company when she wrote about it this January:

Participating coffee retailers stock the cups, made of plant-based plastic, and give them to a CupClub member buying a coffee. The latter can then “return” the cup to any number of locations around the city. Once returned, the cups are collected, washed, and redistributed to the participating stores. And since each cup is RFID tagged and registered to a user’s account, CupClub can charge a user for unreturned cups.

Like we said — similar.

CupClub’s reusable mugs.

But there’s plenty of room for innovation in coffee cup waste reduction, because, well, it’s a huge problem. Most paper coffee cups have a thin plastic lining, which means that they can’t be recycled. That leads to a truly shocking amount of paper cups end up in landfills: over 100 million every day in the U.S. alone.

On the surface, services like Vessel and CupClub sound like a slam-dunk: they reduce the amount of single-use paper cups without making the consumer or the café pay extra money or do extra work. But the success of both companies hinges on one thing: convenience. And that depends on how many drop-off kiosks they have available, and how easy they are for people to swing by when they’re done slurping down their morning caffeine dose. Because if the drop-off locations aren’t convenient, then Vessel and CupClub’s mugs become the same as any other reusable mug you have to tote around with you all day — a pain in the butt.

The link for all kiosk locations led to an error page on the Vessel website, so I couldn’t get a sense of where or how many there are. CupClub may have a better system in place: In October the company announced that it would be trialing its rental cups with the U.K. retail group the John Lewis Partnership, which owns grocery chain Waitrose. Since Waitrose’s and John Lewises are pretty ubiquitous on London streets, it wouldn’t be hard to pop into one to return a cup when you’re done sipping without going out of your way. The other benefit is that CupClub (at least theoretically) won’t have to build out any deposit kiosks, which are costly and could cause logistical headaches.

Here at the Spoon, we’ve been closely covering (and cheering on) the initiatives to do away with single-use cups and straws. Starbucks recently eliminated single-use plastic straws in its store, replacing them with a sippy-cup-like lid. The coffee giant is also working to create a recyclable and/or compostable cup, and McDonald’s joined their mission this July.

But until Starbucks finally develops a recyclable coffee cup, companies like Vessel and CupClub are a good interim solution to take a bite out of paper cup waste.