Famous paper cup design
Al Keating of Coffee Supreme (Photo: Coffee Supreme website)Īttitudes have certainly changed, confirms Al Keating, CEO of Coffee Supreme. Thankfully, the rest of us are catching on, and you don’t need to be an oddball clutching a giant mug to do so (though it’s totally cool if you are – ceramics are very on trend, after all). They could see that using something for 10 minutes and then throwing it away, day after day after day, was lazy, wasteful and, well, just pretty dumb. “You know, tree huggers, people who were thinking about the planet before others.”īut as with much of life, it turns out the quirky ones were in fact ahead of their time. “For years it was quirky people who did it,” agrees Kennedy. In the past few years, reusable coffee cups have become mainstream – compare that to 15 years ago, when I was a barista, and the only people BYOing cups were considered eccentric at best, downright annoying at worst. Having your name printed on something that can end up almost anywhere has got to be good for business, right?īut in recent times, as the modern world’s love of convenience has come back to bite us in the arse in many ways, awareness of the waste created by our takeaway coffee habit has increased. They buy cups printed with their logo from packaging companies, then on-sell to cafes that use their beans.
Coffee cups based on the original Amphora design at a New York coffee cart in 2013 (Photo: Getty Images)įor coffee roasters, takeaway cups have been both a revenue stream and a marketing tool.
Wellington coffee pioneer Jeff Kennedy, who founded Caffe L’affare in 1990, says takeaway coffees have been a part of it since the beginning, though cups were initially the even-worse-for-the-environment polystyrene. We took to them like ducks to water, chugging back those flat whites as we wandered down Cuba St or whizzed up Ponsonby Rd. In New Zealand, we developed our own coffee culture in the 1980s, and takeaway cups came with it. Then came Starbucks and the rise of the the upwardly mobile young professional, for whom takeaway coffee became a status symbol, an indication of how damned busy and in-demand you were. It rose up through Greek-owned New York coffee carts (the now famous Amphora cup – “We are happy to serve you” – was designed with them in mind in 1963), and then through chains like 7-Eleven, which capitalised on the commuter culture that emerged from the suburbanisation of America. While Europe’s coffee culture has always been based on sitting down at a table or standing at the bar and downing an espresso, those upstart Americans pioneered to-go coffee in the 1960s. The modern paper cup made an appearance in the early 20th century as a response to public health concerns around sharing cups at water fountains and the like. Whence does our fondness for sipping out of a little hole in the plastic lid of a plastic-lined paper cup come? The first paper cups were used in imperial China, back in the 2nd century BC or thereabouts, to serve tea. Mike Murphy of Kōkako at Purosa Estate in Papua New Guinea (Photo: Josh Griggs) Most don’t make it there, instead ending up in – you guessed it – landfill. Many cafes use compostable cups, but they need to be sent to a special commercial composting facility to actually break down. The vast majority of disposable coffee cups used in New Zealand can’t be recycled – yes, they’re made of paper, but in order to hold liquid, they’re coated in plastic. With the Packaging Forum estimating that New Zealanders get through a staggering 295 million disposable cups a year, we’ve got a way to go, however. “Probably in the future, carrying a takeaway cup might be viewed kind of like walking down the street with a cigarette,” he says. Mike Murphy, managing director of Auckland roastery Kōkako Organic Coffee, predicts they’ll soon be a relic. I’d wager a whole lot, though hopefully a fraction fewer than there would have been 10 years ago.
How many commuters did you see clutching single-use takeaway coffee cups on your way to work this morning? Or how many empty ones are strewn about the desks in your office right now? Alice Neville ponders our obsession with takeaway culture, and looks at what’s needed for consumers to change their behaviour. New Zealanders throw away 295 million single-use cups per year.