Plastic water bottles and coffee cups drive me crazy since they are such one-time use products. I never buy water in plastic bottles – I have a little metal water bottles and I just refill those.
I was excited to see Fast Company’s article on water bottles which lays out the landscape but also brainstorms ideas on how to change consumer behavior.
Some of the ideas like the Drink Tap Water bottle tops are great in terms of design and functionality. It’s also so easy to carry around by the tap on top. Wonderful.
I also really liked the LUNAR Elements design of a bottle that a consumer returns at the supermarket and it get’s etched with a news headline of the day – over time, the bottle “ages” with more and more headlines. Really cool (check out the article for more details).
I like the design and the thinking, but at the end of the day, I think the change has to be driven by cost and ease. My metal bottle was about $18. Not cheap. But that’s only about 9 bottles of water – something I might have bought in a couple of weeks. So it was worth it.
The next issue is ease – if you forget your water bottle, what are the options but to buy… What if the water companies used metal like soda cans instead of plastic. A thin metal can of water instead of a plastic bottle. I’d buy it.
As a frequent coffee shop visitor, my next pet peeve is coffee cups. I was excited when I saw the Starbucks Coffee Cup Challenge. The idea of rewarding every 10th person who bring in a reusable cup is a great idea – reward for good behavior will likely change behavior.
But for the other 9 people who don’t bring in a reusable cup, what’s the alternative? The cup itself doesn’t bother me so much because it’s in paper, but what bothers me is the lid.It’s entirely in plastic. Do we need the whole lid to be plastic? What if just the area within the red rectangle was plastic – the area where a customer’s mouth touches the product and where the hot liquid touches the bottom of the up. The rest could be heavy cardboard couldn’t it? At least that way you’d eliminate 60% of the plastic…
And the cold beverage cups at Starbucks? Entirely plastic with a huge plastic dome of a lid to accommodate the whipped cream. Total disaster. Why can’t cold beverages be in paper cups too? Am I missing something here?
Image of Drink Tap Water – All rights, Fast Company
Image of Starbucks Lid – All rights, Rantwick
The thing is, that every single time I’ve been presented with this choice, I have always chosen the Add to Google Reader option. So over the course of my usage, I’ve gone through this process about three hundred times, every time choosing the same option. But Google will not learn from my history and do this automatically nor will they offer me a little check box that says “Always choose this option”.