A dedicated Cafe Culture Digital reader and cafe owner shares his viewpoint on the need to find a solution to the reusable cup crisis.
“Dear Editor,
I’m a cafe owner in Central NSW, away from the vibrant cafe scene of the coastal towns and cities and I look towards Cafe Culture for all the up to date news, regulations, trends and supplier information. I can see by your article on the 30th September, entitled “Is this the End of the Reusable Cup?”, that you are at the forefront of the battle to get consumers to use reusable cups. I can’t believe the reusable cup companies haven’t come up with a solution to the crisis.
It appears to me there is enough education available on the television alone, to be fully aware that humankind is on a path of self-destruction. In 10,000 years of human history the environment has varied in temperature by 1 degree and yet in the last 200 years we have pushed the world to warm by doubling that, through blatant disregard and abuse of our planet! Melting the ice caps, murdering our beautiful rainforest and ocean life.
I quickly learnt from just 5-minutes in my own research that we produce 300 million tons of plastic each year worldwide, half of which is for single-use items. That’s nearly equivalent to the weight of the entire human population! I found out from the University of Georgia, who estimated that between 4.8 million and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic per year make their way into the oceans via people living within 30 miles of a coast. The majority of this pollution—dominated by single-use plastic waste.
As Cafe Culture aspires to in their article, a whopping 91 percent of all plastic isn’t recycled at all. Instead it ends up in landfills or in the environment. Our options are limited to recycling and reusable. I think the government should lead the way, in the same way as has been done with plastic bags, surcharging customers for their single use plastic cups in cafes!
Surely in 2020, the year of fire, flood and pandemic, this is a gift in disguise, a chance to push the RESET button on this self-destruction. We will NOT get another chance, BRING BACK THE REUSABLE CUP PLEASE!
Kind Regards
Dillan Bennett, Central NSW”
Cafe Culture are committed to assisting the cafe industry in implementing sustainable practices in a bid to save our environment for future generations.
We are currently working on a solution to the reusable cup crisis.
Watch this space as we reveal our exciting news over the coming days!
