It’s not a paper cup but a coffee cup — what statistics teaches about our trash
Three coffee to go cups. A lid. A shoe box. Some random cardboard which was inside my new runners. A glass bottle. A toothbrush package — plastic and cardboard mix. A few rounds of stuffing paper. And a pack of nuts. This is the content list of one day’s worth of my trash from my recent visit to New York.
Much, not much, is that even the point? It was all recycled material. But I left it in my room at the Standard East Village, so I don’t actually know that it will be recycled. New York City recycles somewhere between 17 and 20% of its waste. The rest, lost to landfill at a massive cost to the taxpayers. Could be better. That’s for sure.
But no, the quantity of my wast is not the point. It’s the composition of my day’s worth of waste that’s relevant, informative and educational.
Three coffee to go cups out of 7 items discarded. That’s 43% of my daily trash. Add the one glass water bottle, and I’m at 57%. All these are items that have an easy replacement. As easy as it was to open the bottle sitting on the hotel table, I could as easily have walked to the bathroom and poured myself a delicious cup of cold tap water. And I can, without any extra hassle put a coffee mug into my rucksack and rather than being served my coffee in paper cups, I could be drinking it from my personal mug. Nicer to touch, nicer to drink from. Nicer to look at. Reusable and more sustainable.
So here we are, discussing trash, but really, this is a problem of human habits. Our daily habits. The little things we do, every day, that in the end add up, and make up most of our waste. It’s not about the random shoe box I discard once every 6 months when I buy a new pair of runners. I can’t do much about that particular package anyways; it’s something that is largely outside of my control. And it’s not a behavior that I engage in often. But coffee is very much a daily habit, and what ‘wrapper’ I drink it in is largely in my control. That’s the stuff that adds up and matters.
Let’s do some math with my coffee addiction, assuming 5 cups a day. If I lived in New York, and drank my coffee on the go, it would come to 5x7x52 = 1820 cups a year. A lot, a little?
An average cup is made of about 20 grams of paper. That’s 36.4kg of paper I consume and toss into the bin each year. A mature pine tree weighs somewhere between 0.9 and 2.7 tones. My coffee habit comes to about 1.1 tones of paper over a lifetime assuming I’m consuming at this rate for about 30 years. Here it is: my coffee habit is costing the planet 1 pine tree.
If 10% of New Yorkers have a remotely similar coffee habit to mine, which they do, the material equivalent is that of a forest. Close to a million pine trees cut down.
For a habit, which has an easy alternative. It crazy. At the same time, it’s not surprising. Why?
Because we don’t know how we waste. We know only that we put things in three or five or seven different bins depending on where we live. We know, roughly, how much trash vs recycling vs composting we throw away. But not more than that. We don’t know the different cluster groups within our private waste stream. We don’t know which are the items we toss away daily. We don’t have statistics, which means we don’t get waste data that is actionable. What does it mean — actionable waste data?
It means knowing how many coffee cups I throw away every day. Three, five, ten coffee cups vs 60, 100, 200 grams of paper. The difference is, I can’t really do much with the paper stat, other than feel guilty. But I can do a lot knowing my main trash item is a to go coffee cup. A to go coffee cup serves a function and a purpose. So if I can replace it with a reusable one, but still get the same function and utility out of the replacement, I have just done two things:
- I’ve become an eco warrior who has reduced my own trash by 48%, and I feel great about it;
- I still get to do what is important to me, drink my coffee several time a day, but now I do so out of a cup I own and which on top of being reusable is also esthetically or otherwise appealing.
Data is a fancy word for clustering. For counting. For identification of patterns. And tracking is how we get the data. Again, a pile of trash doesn’t tell us anything. It’s a pile. Is it a lot? A little? It smells. An eye sore. But granular data tells us so much more — it tells stories, not just of our guilty habits and pleasures, but stories about our habits that could and should be replaced, repaired or changed. And stories is info we can use to activate, to transform ourselves from being part of the problem to being part of the solution.
What I found especially interesting about my day’s worth of trash collected was that the actual amount was not what impressed or shocked me the most. It was the cluster of waste that jumped at me heavy. This sent my brain screeching for solutions of how I could continue to enjoy my coffee but change the way it is served to me. I want the coffee; not the packaging. And that’s the point of Binit, we’re converting your trash into data points that reveal patterns; where across your waste piles hide the opportunities for self improvement.
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