Betacup Challenge - Design A Sustainable Coffee Cup | Hacker News Reader

Betacup Challenge - Design A Sustainable Coffee Cup

thebetacup.com

16 pointsTichy31 comments

I have a hard time seeing how this is anything other than a feel-good distraction that provides little in the way of real benefits. Non-disposable coffee cups do not make up a meaningful proportion of our environmental footprint as a whole.

If there's a need to change something (such as environmental footprint) then use market mechanisms[1] to implement it.

[1] For example, if landfill needs to be reduced one could charge money based on volume/weight of rubbish collected.

What's wrong with a feel-good distraction? Instead of implementing "Hello World" in 120 languages, why not tinker with papercup designs?

I don't have a problem with someone tinkering with coffee cup designs if it gives them enjoyment. I just find the pretense that it's going to make a non-negligible difference to the environment puzzling and intellectually dishonest.

What's wrong with a feel-good distraction? Instead of implementing "Hello World" in 120 languages, why not tinker with papercup designs?

Why not do something actually meaningful?

There's an awesome talk by Richard Hamming on pg's website (http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html), where he recounts:

And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!

"58 billion paper coffee cups" doesn't sound so negligible to me? Sure, it is might not be as paramount as plugging the oil spill to me, but perhaps making a small impact is better than no impact.

I just mentioned the 120 programming languages because I am sure that post would make it on HN, too.

Are you working on superimportant stuff all the time?

Also read Richard Feynman's books - he claims when he was stuck for a while, he only managed to make progress again when he started to do calculations on the rotation of thrown paper cups just for fun for a while. He later derived some quantum mechanics stuff from those paper cup equations.

Big challenges are sometimes too big. Small challenges can teach us techniques to solve bigger challenges. Before you fly to the moon, you have to get a tin can in orbit.

Coffee cups are easy to relate to, so the hope is to inspire a lot of interest. That energy once applied to this problem can be reused to work on similar problems of bigger scope.

My brother takes his own cups and receptacles to coffee shops and take-away joints. On more than one occasion the cardboard coffee cup / styrofoam tray was used as a measuring device, before then being thrown away, leading to much "you're missing the point" frustration.

You just have to train them! http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/dear-vancouver-barristas

One of my favorite coffee joints (at the local library} actually gives you a discount for bringing your own cup. [it also has cream instead of half-and-half]

Clay cups work fine in India and they are sustainable <http://chaipilgrimage.com/2008/09/14/the-indian-clay-cup/...;

Link doesn't work, but if it is a proven concept, might be an easy win for the competition?

Edit: fixed link http://chaipilgrimage.com/2008/09/14/the-indian-clay-cup/

Now if somebody could solve the problem of mud dissolving into the chai/coffee, it might be a winner.

Where I lived in India many years ago they used glass cups not clay. I have a vivid memory of sitting at a roadside stall, enjoying my cup of chai and then watching in horror as the chaiwalla squatted beside the gutter with a pitcher of cold water and rinsed out the cups using his grimy fingers to swish the water around. Yes, disposable clay cups would be a major improvement.

I've seen both used. glass cups are probably more common but clay is still used in plenty of places.

Sustainable just means "more flattering to my sense of aesthetics than the alternatives." It is highly non-obvious to me that producing paper cups is more resource intensive than producing clay cups, or that waste produced by clay cups is easier to store than waste produced by paper cups.

Clay cups, for example, require dredging up a whole lot of water and river mud, which (despite the fact that it is done inefficiently by poor people, which is apparently the working definition for "environmentally conscious" for reasons I do not pretend to understand) is not an ecologically neutral action. Scale it to Starbucks level consumption and that is an awful lot of river mud. 11 million metric tonnes, by my back of the envelope math. Plus whatever energy you use in construction of the cups, which aren't exactly carving themselves out of the mud in a carbon-neutral fashion.

This could be averted, of course, if people would simply consume less coffee, but that might be a bridge too far for the latte liberals at Starbucks. I'm sure they'll find a cup which looks absolutely nothing like a paper cup, which will ostentatiously proclaim that consuming this cup of coffee makes you a better person than consuming that other cup of coffee, which is about 99% of the purpose of environmentalism: social signaling of moral worth among rich people for whom traditional religion holds little attraction.

there's a detergent in the UK whose recent ad campaign made much of it's new "greenness" due to the fact that it now used 90% less packaging.

This is because they changed the packaging from glass to plastic, and were measuring by weight.

Maybe some other material could be found, that is less costly to produce than paper or clay. I think for paper a lot of chemicals have to be used?

Didn't McDonalds experiment with "eatable" packages? Some grain (sweetcorn?) might have the property of being easily molded into cups (think ice cream cones). Then add some wax to make it water proof? Except I suppose wax would melt from hot coffee? Also, growing corn requires water, too.

Just as an example - you don't have to treat sweetcorn with chemicals to make it moldable. Maybe a lot of properties of paper are not required for coffee cups, so a simpler material could be used.

Are you talking about PLA and the like? It's pretty much a biodegradable/compostable plastic made from corn starch or sugarcane. I've seen utensils made from it in some cafeterias. But they can make lots of things with it, here they make coffee cups: http://www.cagreen.ca/Hot%20Cups-0

I wonder if the makers of the betacup challenge were aware of that - I suppose not...

They might still consider it "wasteful" since the same number of cups would be thrown away. But I believe they can be made with the waste products from the processing of corn or sugarcane that already happens.

i agree with your technical points regarding clay cups, but your cynicism is really nasty. and your final sentence about the "purpose of environmentalism" (whatever that means) is pretty bogus.

He's right though. A lot of the "green" movement is feel good rather than practical. Not that the good intentions aren't there of course.

I don't think any of these designs will help if they continue to give them away for free.

I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how effectively the supermarkets in my town changed behavior by charging for bags. Of course, it helps that they're a cartel: if any store in this neighborhood hadn't adopted the "5 yen per bag OR bring your own" on the same day, they would have done quite a bit of business.

I even bought myself a shopping bag, even though my math brain told me that I would likely have to live in Japan for at least another six years until I had recouped the $9 it cost me.

what wrong with people carrying their own travel mug?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00015CMVE/

is what i carry everywhere

I was kind of thinking the same thing. Can we submit the no-cup design, where one simply does not supply disposable cups? People would get used to bringing their own mug pretty quickly, methinks.

I picture a kind of coffee fountain, where people would catch coffee with their palms, like they would from a well. Ouch.

That'd oxidize the coffee too quickly though. It'd be gas-station, burned-in-all-night coffee in 30 minutes.

Wounds heal. Good coffee is forever.

exactly: encourage people to bring travel mugs by giving a small discount, have ceramic mugs for drinking in, and have bins for recycling or composting for people who have a left over cup in their car.

This always strikes me as a sanitation nightmare, when I see staff heading over the sink to rinse out... who knows what. Most cups are probably fairly clean, but I imagine a portion of them being a problem to one degree or another.

After staff rinses the cup, do they wash their hands? How careful are or do they need to be in avoiding cross contamination when they handle the equipment to fill the cup?

Then again, they are already handling money from customers, so I don't know whether it really makes much difference. But while I appreciate the sentiment of bring your own, I always wonder how much staff time, cleanliness, water (hot water?), etc. it is costing. (I don't know -- just wonder.)

How about blasting it with steam for 30 seconds? And I do mean blasting, none of that wimpy froth-your-milk-wand stuff. That'd sanitize it and pre-heat your mug, and requires no questionable fingers on the inside.

Seems like unless your power is hydroelectric, wind, or solar, generating the electricity to make and blast 30 seconds of steam for a cup of coffee may produce more undesirable byproducts than a paper cup.

My design would be a giant coffee shaped recycle bin in the coffee shop and the 2 streets adjacent to it. Would lead to more effective recycling.

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