Love coffee. Not so sure about the cups.

Coffee CupsCoffee. We love our coffee here in Australia. But they love it in America too. And in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil.. need I go on?

I have no idea how many take-away coffees get snaffled up every morning on our planet but this tidy set of infographics sheds some light on what’s going on. In just one of those countries mentioned, the US, a paper cup heavy weight, gets through sixteen billion of the things a year.

Strangely, every time you get a take-away coffee you pay less for it than having it in house. Yet there’s an additional cost to the cafe of the takeaway cup, the lid and as for the environmental cost..Coffe cup pile

I know what you’re thinking: “Leave me alone already, can I not simply enjoy a single cup of coffee in the morning without some tree hugging do-gooder on my case, berating me with stats and facts, while beating me round my still yet-to-be-caffeinated head with charts and infographics about all the damage I’m doing to the world and telling me what an awful person I am? Sheesh, surely this isn’t asking too much?” … or something along those lines.

Well how about this then. Earth Hour… but for coffee. A single hour when you get to enjoy your coffee in the cafe , in a proper cup and take your time about it too.

What if a coffee loving city such as Melbourne took up the mantle to save hundreds, thousands, millions, and, with a bit of help from our friends, billions of coffee cups every year simply by promoting ‘coffee hour’? It could work something like this:

From, say, 8-9am once a year, or a month or even a week, any participating cafe would offer an in-house coffee with complimentary newspaper and access to all their lovely breakfast treats and delights for the price of a takeaway coffee.

Customers who normally take a coffee away would be encouraged to slow  down and enjoy their brew in-house instead, for less than the price of a standard in-house cuppa and without the impact on the planet.

Each cafe taking part would record the number of cups saved and suddenly, out of nowhere , infographics would begin to emerge showing neat little bar charts made up of all the new trees grown, graphs depicting the tons of CO2 that haven’t been emitted, diagrams of the piles of waste saved and zillions of litres of water not used to create all those cups.

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That’s a pretty weighty infographic right there. You could dish out quite a beating with one of those.
photo credit: elyse patten via photopin cc

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