Does anything symbolise the throwaway culture better than coffee chains? Every one is piled high with by-products of a culture which in the past 10 years has gone from thinking that a cheap cup of coffee is enjoyed sitting down, in a break from a busy day to one where if you’re not constantly rushing, you may get to work to find your desk gone.
Gone are the thick white mugs, washed and reused until they broke. Instead, we’ve a vast new industry of disposables for coffee on the go and then into bins. There are no regulations determining what materials they use or how they dispose of the waste. So they do what they like – which turns out to vary wildly.
One reason may be that three different government departments are in charge of waste management. Of course the real point of a takeaway cup is to take it away, so we need the bins in the street, not in the store. And we probably need half a dozen separate bins, until the ink, the glue, the cling film and the cardboard are standardised.
Don’t hold your breath. Although you can hide the cheap cups, ignore them or attempt to leave them behind, you can’t really throw them away because there is as the poster tells us no ‘away’. Instead, why not do without the cheap and wasteful paper cup and give yourself a few precious minutes to daydream in a cafe?
