Meanwhile, companies like Georgia-Pacific LLC and International Paper Co. have grown along with the market for disposable cups, which hit $12 billion in 2016. By 2026, it’s expected to be closer to $20 billion.
The U.S. accounts for about 120 billion paper, plastic and foam coffee cups each year, or about one-fifth of the global total. Almost every last one of them—99.75 percent—ends up as trash, where even paper cups can take more than 20 years to decompose.
A wave of plastic bag bans has inspired the new efforts to curb cup trash. Food and beverage containers are a much bigger problem, sometimes generating 20 times the garbage that plastic bags do in any one locale. But reverting to reusable cloth bags is relatively easy. With to-go coffee cups, there’s no simple alternative. Berkeley is encouraging residents to bring a travel mug—just throw it in your reusable shopping bag!—and both Starbucks and Dunkin’ give discounts to those who do.
Coffee shops know reusable cups are a good solution, but right now, at franchises they can be sort of an "operational nightmare," says Dunkin’s Murphy. Servers never know if a cup is dirty or if they should wash it, and it’s hard to know how much to fill a small or medium coffee in a large mug.
A decade ago, Starbucks pledged to serve up to 25 percent of its coffee in personal travel mugs. It has since ratcheted its goals way down. The company gives a discount to anyone who brings their own mug, and still only about 5 percent of customers do. It temporarily added a 5-pence surcharge to disposable cups in the U.K. last year, which it said increased reusable cup use 150 percent.
“It’s a journey. I don’t think it will ever be over.”
So companies keep working on a better cup.
It took nine years for Dunkin’ to figure out an alternative to its signature foam cup. An early attempt required new lids, themselves difficult to recycle. Prototypes made out of 100 percent recycled materials buckled and tipped on the bottom. A cup made of mushroom fibers promised to decompose easily, but it was too expensive to scale up at large volumes.
The chain finally settled on a double-walled plastic-lined paper cup, thick enough to protect sippers’ hands without an external sleeve and compatible with existing lids. They’re made from ethically sourced paper and biodegrade faster than foam, but that’s about it—they’re more expensive to make and aren’t recyclable most places.
Paper cups are notoriously difficult to recycle. Recyclers worry the plastic linings will gum up their machines, so they nearly always send them to trash. There are only three “batch pulper” machines in North America that are capable of separating plastic lining from paper.