Hey all,
I'm working with an appliance store and I'd like to suggest that they replace their paper cups for their coffee station with ceramic mugs. Has anyone ever done this with this kind of thing (a car place coffee station or something might be similar as well).
I'm not too, too concerned about cost (though they might be - I realize this will be a bit of an up-front investment), I just had thought originally that I might suggest compostable cups, but they still have to finish their coffee in the store if they were to compost them (the store is considering introducing an organics program). I'm wondering if offering ceramic mugs as well as paper cups so that people at least have the choice.
I guess what I'm most wondering is just if anyone has had experience with this kind of idea at a free/public/unsupervised coffee station and how it worked. I'm a little bit worried about theft and I guess someone will also have to make rounds every once in a while to pick up the dirty mugs. I guess the other thing I'm thinking is that people might be disappointed they can't take their coffee with them when they leave (not sure how long people typically shop in a store like this, although the employee there might know), but I'm thinking that some informational signage might help as well as the possibility of offering paper cups as well.
Sorry for the disorganized thoughts - just wondering if anyone has had any experience with something like this!
Thanks! :)
Lauren Minuk
Green Workplace Consultant
Green Calgary
Canada
Reusable Mugs for Public Coffee Stations
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Thanks so much for your feedback! I think my best course of action at this point will be to ask my contact at the store what his thoughts are and what the barriers are that he can think of, especially in terms of "selling" the idea to upper management. They might actually like it of branded mugs get stolen - that way their brand gets out in to the community a bit!
Thanks again everyone, this is super helpful!
Lauren Minuk
Green Workplace Consultant
Green Calgary
Canada
Hi, Lauren,
I work for a city and have been actively trying to reduce disposable cup use. While we do have an organics program, our compost facility doesn't really want them. Plus there are, of course, the upstream as well as downstream impacts that we would like to avoid.
My public mug experience is with our HR training room. I provided about 30 recycled glass mugs to replace the disposable cups that were constantly purchased and thrown away. Within a month HR called me to request more mugs as people seemed to be leaving with them.
We drilled down a little bit to see what the barriers were to leaving the mugs in the room. First, we discovered that people really liked the mugs and thought they were pretty nice (a lovely cobalt blue with a message stating "Made from recycled glass!"). There was no dedicated place to return the mugs. Seeing them as free, they took them back to their desks in other buildings. To help people re-think, we set up a return area with a sign, "Return mugs here". Telling people what to do helped slow the loss.
At some point the inventory significantly decreased and HR staff began supplementing with paper cups. We observed that when people were given a choice between disposable and reusable, they uniformly selected the paper cups, which we found puzzling as we are a zero waste city and have a fairly robust employee recycling program with regular waste reduction messaging. Again drilling down we found that people who selected the paper cups felt that they were helping out HR staff who might be stuck with the chore of washing the mugs. No one wants to wash dishes! We re-jiggered the coffee area to move the disposables out of easy reach and displayed the durable mugs more prominently. Our suggestion was that an announcement be made at the outset of trainings to alert staff to the presence of the durable mugs, invite them to use the mugs and to please return at session end. There is no data yet to see if this has increased durable use or slowed the loss of inventory.
As for having to retrieve mugs in the retail setting, I would guess that store employees would need to recover dirty durable mugs as I frequently see disposable cups left on store shelves anyway. Hope our experience helps!
Best,
Mary
Mary Lindemuth
Commercial Recycling Coordinator
City of Sunnyvale
United States
Hi Lauren - not sure if this is any use to you - case study from Ireland on page 20 of this document
http://www.ghaward.ie/ghaward/userfiles/file/Case%20Studies/GHP%202012%20Case%20Study%20Booklet%20v1.pdf
Regards
Nial O'Connor
Local Authority Prevention Network - Monaghan County Council
Northern Ireland
In Australia the Gloria Jeans chain does this disposable cup thing too. I've never spoken to them but in thinking through the issue as to how to do this, I decided that their prime motivator is cost reduction by not having to pay staff to collect, clean/wash the cups, (plus electricity cost on dishwashing). For them this would be a major 'attraction' to the throwaway culture. The other issues you mention - take away - is also critical. That your situation is not actually a coffee shop so the coffee is very incidental to their business is another factor weighing against in house for the same reasons in Gloria Jeans. For Gloria Jeans I was thinking they could offer a line of Keep Cups, but in your situation recycling of cups and compostable might have to be the way to go.
Peter Tait
Australia