ditching the paper coffee cup

Image: Dino De Luca / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There was a time when I would buy a cup of coffee almost every day. Sometimes more than one cup per day, and it usually came in a paper cup. It really didn't feel like I was doing anything really bad. I mean, one paper cup won't hurt anything right? Unfortunately, there were millions of other people with my paper coffee cup habit thinking the same thing.

Here's the problem:

• In 2010, an estimated 23 billion paper coffee cups will be used. It takes 9 million trees and enough energy to power 77,000 homes to make these cups.
• Paper coffee cups are lined with a plastic resin called polyethylene, so they can hold hot liquid. With this coating they cannot be recycled. All of these coffee cups end up in landfills.
• In the landfill the paper cups decompose and release methane, a greenhouse gas that traps even more heat than carbon dioxide.
• Most coffee cups are not made of recycled paper, as recycled paper is typically not strong enough to hold liquid.

Suddenly, my coffee has a bitter aftertaste.

My solution:

Well, for starters I'm going to make my coffee at home and drink it from a mug. I've been doing this for a while now to save time and money, and I enjoy it just as much. On the weekends, I will still treat myself to a fancy coffee, but I will do it in a reusable mug. One study found that I'll have to use my stainless steel mug 24 times for it to be more environmentally friendly than paper cups. That's 3 months of weekend coffees for me.

Here's a back of the napkin calculation on savings, because I LOVE to quantify things:

Money saved:

$624 per year

(Making my own coffee vs. 3 lattes and 2 coffees out per week)

Resources saved:

350 cups per year

140 pounds greenhouse gases per year

21.6 pounds of solid waste per year

My coffee habit alone will save one tree every seven years

Sources:

http://www.edf.org/documents/523_starbucks.pdf p.25.

Also see http://www.sustainabilityissexy.com/facts.html for more fascinating and terrifying figures

Meatless meals

Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32599519@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

Last November I stopped cooking meat at home. I had been wanting to reduce our meat consumption for a while, but it just seemed so hard to change all of my regular recipes for new vegetarian ones. It turned out that it wasn't as hard as I had feared to kick the meat habit.

I started with a one-month commitment, figuring we could go without until the Thanksgiving turkey. I don't keep secrets from my husband, but I made an exception and didn't tell him we about eating meat for the first week. I wanted to make sure this commitment was going to stick, and I figured once I got a few tasty meatless meals in him he would not protest.

It turns out I had nothing to fear. I had to step out of my recipe comfort zone (some may refer to as a rut) and find new ones, but I discovered many easy, delicious, and satisfying meals that my husband and three-year old both love. I even made lasagna for my in-laws with vegetarian sausage that they raved about. Truth be told, we have fallen off the wagon as the busy-ness of summer took over. Part of the beauty of this is that you can do what you can, and be as committed as you want at any particular time.

There is a wonderful effort called the PB&J Campaign, a campaign to reduce the amount of animal products people eat by encouraging people to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of meat and dairy. Really, any plant-based meal will do, but a PB&J is something pretty familiar to even the biggest meat-lovers, and tasty too. It is a fun way to think about reducing your footprint, but the impact is quite significant. According to their website:

-Each time you have a plant-based meal like a PB&J sandwich you reduce your carbon dioxide emissions over an animal-based meal by 2.5 pounds for lunch.
-If you have a PB&J instead of red meat, you reduce your carbon footprint by 3.5 pounds.
-You also save a whopping 133 gallons of water at lunch, and 24 square feet of land from deforestation and pollution.

Holy cow!

The numbers don't work out perfectly, as my family does eat dairy and eggs, but on average my family is saving:
-22.5 pounds of carbon each day, 540 pounds each month, and about 7000 pounds per year;
-7128 gallons of water per week, or 373,000 per year; and
-1296 square feet of land each week.

That's nothing to shake a stick at.

I'm thoroughly convinced that anybody can do this. You get to make rules that work for your family, whether you want to remove meat at one meal per week or avoid all animal products for one month each year. For our family, we started by not eating meat at home, but eating whatever we want at restaurants (about once a week). We occasionally do cook meat for visitors and on special occasions. It also helps that we happen to really like peanut butter and jelly.