Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Friday, June 1, 2007

I’ve always had an aversion to unnecessary waste of any kind, but disposable coffee cups somehow stand at the top of the heap. Use ‘em once and toss ‘em. Out of sight and out of mind, right? Actually not. Whether foam or cardboard, they live on for generations in the landfill, long past the time that you and I remain on this earth. Disposable cups—unlike say, disposable syringes, for instance—strike me as unnecessary, even frivolous, in all but the occasional situation.

Why? Because there’s a simple alternative: a reusable container, like the ceramic variety or the travel mug. All it takes is a moment of consciousness before you leave your home or office. The thing is: We can all carry travel mugs, but most of us don’t. For me, the disposable coffee mug, especially the foam variety, has become emblematic of our culture of disposability.

In fact, in one of the early episodes of our Simple Living television series, we did the math. I calculated that in the 20 years I’ve been carrying a travel mug everywhere I go (including to church on Sunday), I’ve saved 7,200 disposable cups.

So I was delighted, on a recent shoot for season #4 of our series, to stumble upon a smart practice that encourages waste reduction on the ground. A couple of months ago, our camera crew went to the Tate Street Coffee House in Greensboro, NC—a delightful locally owned and operated coffee shop that is the place to chug your joe near the University of North Carolina at Greensboro campus—for a bit of liquid refreshment and also to shoot some “person-on-the-seat” interviews (off-the-cuff comments from patrons while sipping their morning coffee) on a number of topics including climate change and the connection between simplicity and art.

But I wasn’t expecting to stumble onto a method of encouraging waste reduction in the coffee mug department, which strikes me as one of the smartest practices of the sort I’ve seen anywhere in my travels around America. What Tate Street Coffee House owner Matt Russ has done is devise a system that, in effect, punishes customers for NOT bringing a travel mug. He has devised a “fast lane”—affectionately known as “MEL” (for morning express lane)—for customers carrying travel mugs. If you buy one of his house, green-colored mugs (which sells for $4), you pay $1 for a medium cup of coffee that would ordinarily sell for $1.35. (That $1 includes tax so you just show up with a buck, pour your own and move on with your day.) Not only will you save money, but you save time. Those who are not carrying a travel mug, in contrast, must stand in line to order their drink from an attendant, and are often out not only the extra 35 cents but five, eight or even ten minutes of their precious morning time. (And if you have your own non-Tate Street Coffee House mug, you still get to use the MEL lane but you only get 10 cents off your order, so you pay $1.25.)

What the good folks at Tate Street Coffee House are doing strikes me as the kind of thinking America needs to engage in right now. During lunch a few weeks ago, a new friend coined the term “smart green” to describe the smart approach for business leaders and citizens to take in tackling the enormous environmental challenges we all face today.

My hat’s off to Matt Russ for his simple, low-tech solution to the disposable mug problem. In fact, I’m so excited about his approach that I think it should be instituted in every coffee shop in America. Starbucks, take note!