Are Ceramic Cups Greener Than Disposables?

You are correct -- I find this hard to believe. Let's start with the basics:

1. It appears they did not take into account the plastic top on the cup. How often do you purchase coffee or tea and not have a plastic top on it?

2. It appears they did not take into account the extra cup or thick holder that goes around the cup to keep you from burning yourself (which uses as many resources as the cup itself).

I would like to see this re-done to account for 'real world' use of these cups. Maybe their focus is on the office environment and not your trip to Starbucks, but studies like this often get confused for evidence that going to your corner coffee dive without a re-usable travel mug is somehow 'green'.

When you take into account that the study was funded by the companies behind these cups, it should raise an eyebrow. My guess is that the number of times you have to re-use a mug is close to the 100 times area than the 1000 times after all of these factors have been accurately examined.

Regardless, using a mug 1000 times in it's lifetime is hardly a difficult task. My favorite mug has probably been used five times that many times since I fill it three times daily.

so the ratio is 1,000:1 uses for parity. OK. So if I use my cup at the office for two drinks a day for a year, then I need to use the ceramic mug for two years for it to break even.

Well, I drink more like 6 beverages a day from a ceramic mug at work, and of about a dozen mugs in the office for everyone's use, I think only one or two has been broken in eight years. That gives me a payback of about 5 months.

So, I'd say that under normal use the ceramic mug will far outstrip the disposable cup in it's environmental performance, plus it will give you a superior beverage drinking experience and keep your beverage hotter longer.

Let's not forget that you need more space to store all of those disposable cups, and you increase your trash volume. That costs money.

But not all ceramic mugs are equal. Some are larger, some use more clay/volume, some have complicated glazing.

I recycle my broken ceramics by using them for drainage spacers in the bottom of flowerpots.

So disposables take less to ship but one ceramic used 100's of times would need 100's of disposables shipped. Seems like disposables wouldnt have much of an edge on shipping energy req'd. Also, the disposables also have to be shipped again to be, well, disposed. I guess this also happens to ceramics eventually but again the ratio would be something like 100:1.
Disposables (polystyrene) are never (in my experience) recycled. I thought there were issues recycling 'food service' paper/polystyrene products (i.e. they have to be cleaned first)

The other factor not considered is this:

Most of us *already own* our re-usable travel mugs. So we've already spent the resources on producing & shipping them. Now, all we have to do is wash them once a day.

If we re-calculated each person purchasing 1 0r 2 light-weight re-usable travel mug in their lifetime, we might find a huge difference.

I agree that the funding of the study greatly influences the outcome. We find it in drug studies all the time.

That's ridiculous.

The best way to look at this would be a combination of cost and externalities right?

So the cost of a ceramic mug is $2. For the same cost you could get around 100 coffee cups.

It takes maybe 2 oz of water to rinse a cup after you drink from it. This cost is about 2 thousandths of a cent. So lets say you wash thoroughly, with 20 oz of water. You now need to use the mug 101 times before it breaks even.

In fact, the cost of 10 gallons of water is the same as the cost of 1 paper cup. So after your mug is paid for you can wash it with 10 gallons of water every time you would have thrown away a paper cup and break even.

In terms of externalities, I seriously doubt that per weight a coffee mug is more expensive than paper In fact 1000 cups weighs in at 17 pounds and is an oversized box.

100 cups then would weigh about 1.7 pounds or about the same as a mug. This means that the shipping is neutral.

Okay so now we hae to use the mug 101 times in order to take care of all of the external costs.

To take care of externalities. The cup has them, the mug doesn't as the cost of washing it is included in the cost of ownership.

Disposal costs would be around the same as 100 coffee cups as we would assume a waste disposal issue is by weight. (By size, the mug would be better).

And external cost of the mug is probably cancelled out by the mass of the paper being equivalent. I think it would generally cost the same for paper and ceramic by weight in terms of environmental impact.

So the total cost of your mug (from cradle to grave) woul probably be the same as around 201 paper cups.

For the 6 cups per day people, that's just 1 month. For all of us 2 a day people, that's 3 months.

Economics is green!

I would be curious to know if they factored a "full wash" into their statistics for the ceramic mug. I seldom use soap and water on my coffee mugs at work—maybe once every couple of weeks. I do rinse them out regularly.

Even at home, I choose to reuse my mug throughout the day for a variety of liquids before tossing it into the dishwasher.

If something is reusable, it will always trump something that is disposable so long as people don't go crazy at clean up time.

Think I'll have another cup now, in my ceramic mug.

Boy I feel good!

How many ergs had to die to write that 'study'? Greenwashing is most definitely not sustainable.

And I hate it when they double-cup! It's like getting slipped a plastic bag at the grocery store when you are busy figuring out their debit machine.

In a nut-shell, I've never seen a coffee cup recycling depository. Land fill is my pet peeve. The energy to make a cup can be produced responsibly. I've used my 16 year old ceramic mug up to a thousand times a year, though these days it's more like 500.

Eh, my solution with my office mug is that I rarely "wash" it. I simply take a damp paper towel (actually usually the one leftover from when I wash & dry my hands) and wipe out the inside and the lip. The mug gets a real wash in the kitchen on Fridays. I've had the same mug for 4 years and have three drinks a day (one coffee & 2 tea).

Broken ceramic isn't as big of a deal ecologically as all those bits of polystyrene, which can end up in the ocean and in birds & other sea creatures bellies.

Finally, I prefer drinking out of MY cup.

At home I'm not quite as efficient though, I'll admit. I have a water glass that goes for three or four days before ending up in the dishwasher or whenever there's room.

I once had a set of glass mugs, I'm wondering if they're a good solution. They're recyclable (though of course still as heavy as ceramic).

(Monty - you didn't mention the NYC practice of putting coffee into paper bags.)

I don't use any extra water to wash my coffee mug at home. I put it in the dishwasher, that uses less water than hand washing and really doesn't use more water to clean my mug than it needed to clean the rest of my dirty plates and dishes.

So, no washing tax on the ceramic mug.

Now, does anyone walk into a coffee shop with a mug and have them fill it? Just wondering?

It seems as if everything is turning green nowadays. And people just can’t understand why consumers aren’t buying more of it. Not rocket science – really. People buy for many reasons – not just the environmental impact. You think you can sell a “green” blow-up doll? Maybe look at functionality, price, quality etc first before turning everything green. Then we can start changing the consumers. More on this on my blog at http://angryafrican.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/make-it-better-can-i-interest-you-in-a-green-blow-up-doll/

the fact that we are still trying to justify disposables as green is just sad

AA has an excellent point. Disposable vs. permanent aside, there's a lot more issues to consider in making something green. Redesigning to use less materials makes something green, but less materials also means CHEAPER. And if you advertise the "cheaper" angle, this would probably be more appealing to the average consumer than the "green" angle.

We can't change the entire world in a single step. We CAN change the entire world one piece at a time. And it's going to take a methodical, planned approach to shift the consumption patterns of the bulk of humankind.

I'm a potter and see great cultural value in using handmade objects. If my artwork weren't functional, it wouldn't save any paper but it would have inarguable cultural value anyway. I think it's both environmentally helpful and personally enriching to buy handmade pots over either paper or industrially made ceramics.

Could somone do an energy analysis of my vacuum stlye coffee travel mug? It has two different types of plastic (black lid and handle, and clear outside), a rubber base and an aluminium inner?

I think the energy debate is a little silly, when the littering issue from styreofoam and paper cups is far greater. If I had a dollar for every cup i've seen floating down a creek, or wedge under a tree on the job sites i work on...

I am getting so tired of repeating this. Disposable cannot be green. Only renewable can be green. Even renewable does not guarantee sustainable.

Polystyrene is made from oil. Oil is used to run tractors and make fertilizer to grow food. People are starving. Every time you use a foam cup you are a murderer.

Even paper cups...made from plant fibre. As we run out of oil and switch to plant based biofuels, are we really going to want to hold a drink? Or would we rather use that fibre to heat a house or fuel a tractor.

This kind of study is a stupid waste of time. LCA is incapable of valuing the future. It should only be used to choose between two sustainable options.

I made my mug, I fired it my kiln using renewable power, and I've been using the same mug at work for 4 years now. This maybe true for some, but certainly not for me.

I drink about 5 cups of tea at work a day (I'm British), so I could easily drink my ceramic cup's-worth in a year. And the tea tastes better than in plastic too.

Has there been any similar study into glass mugs?

The argument comparing ceramic mugs to paper or polystyrene cups is an example of the kind of mindless bureaucratic stonewalling that is being thrown in the path of our capitalizing on recycling procedures. If you don't throw away your ceramic cup and use it until it breaks, gets lost, or falls into disfavour- you are saving that many useless landfill items from dirtying your real environment. The soap and water used to clean one cup also cleans all the other dishes in the sink. We do dishes to prevent disease and in order for us to be able to live indoors. We are using soaps now that are altered to protect our downstream water resources. We need to start modularizing all our glass and ceramic containers. Visit the URL I list here for a campaign to standardize our vessels worldwide- so that paper and plastic can serve humanity in ways that are consistent with good housekeeping and intergenerational environmental objectives. http://jakesphere.tripod.com/univesselsintenational/

I have not gone all the way back to the original sources (Univerity of Victoria, Dutch Government) to see what their assumptions are, but there is one situation where the argument might make more sense. That is at a commercial food and drink source (Starbucks, Peet's Coffee, etc.) They would have to follow commercial sanitary standards for every washing and provide storage space. Except, of course if the customers brought their own reusable mugs and cups and did a more casual job of washing up a mug that only they would use.

But that does not affect the Take a Mug to Work argument at all, and the earlier posts have raised a number of potential flaws in the studies. How about looking at the original studies to see just what the assumptions are? Does anyone have links to them?

In addition to coffee, bring a set of real dishes and flatware to the office (if you work at one of those offices that is always putting food out). Second hand stores are a great source. Oh yeah, and a cloth napkin. My latest move has been to bring my own "to go" containers to restaurants. (this actually causes some funny looks)

I do not think that you need to look at "study" to know that a reusable ceramic cup is grenner than any disposable cups.

lets now do this study with paper towels and bath towels

Even if that is so...how long does it take a polystyrene cup to meld back into the earth? What toxins does it leach in the process? How many polystyrene cups will an individual use in their lifetime compared to using one ceramic cup?

It may sound like a good argument on paper but I don't buy it. Was the study funded by the polystyrene council. Sometimes you have to follow the money to find the true truth.

Like others, I'd like to see the analysis done in real-world terms.

For my part, I drink several drinks a day out of my mug (mostly metal with some plastic, rather than ceramic). And I don't wash it every time I use it, just once a day, with the occasional quick rinse during the day.

It would be much more interesting if the comparison included other kinds of mug material.
What about mugs made of plastic, glass, wood, metal, etc. and compare them with the polystyrene cups ?

Let's think instinctively here...disposable vs. a cup we already own? It should be obvious. These are not diapers either - they are cups and the variables are many, as we can see by all the comments. I would bet that most people can reuse their cup with a quick rinse, but even if not, does this mean we should all run out and buy paper plates for our home cooked meals? Stick with ceramic cups - it tastes so much better.

This is similar to the 'ol EMail joke where it starts with the number of people in a country, then starts subtracting for kids, those in the Army, & in hospital etc. and by the end only two people are actually working; in other words - misuse of statistics! Next Oil will be shown to be the Greenest of energy sources!
With all the talk lately about plastics leaching into food containers does one really want to drink a hot liquid from something treated with or made from plastic? Me? Not so much!

The Guardian article explains that ceramic mugs "are bigger and heavier than polystyrene cups." OK, fine, but 1,000 polystyrene cups are heavier than one ceramic mug, and all 1,000 of those poly cups would have been transported by truck to feel my my 1,000 beverages, so that nulls that argument.

My brain hurts.

Isn't the point to find something reusable rather than buy/use/toss? Let's keep it simple.

That's the problem with scientific studies. Sometimes they just confuse the issue. We all know it's better to use a cup made from earth, chosen by you, used every day, part of your kitchen, part of your home, nice to put to your lips, maybe even has a story. We don't need statistics to tell us it isn't so.

That's the problem with scientific studies. Sometimes they just confuse the issue. We all know it's better to use a cup made from earth, chosen by you, used every day, part of your kitchen, part of your home, nice to put to your lips, maybe even has a story. We don't need statistics to tell us it isn't so.

the study seems to assume we all buy our mugs brand new - i got most of ours as gifts or from goodwill, so how does that factor in? some of these things are over 20 years old, so no energy has been used to make them in a long time.....

The studies only compared energy consumption on a life-cycle basis. Even there, it was very restrictive in talking about 'energy of fabrication' not 'life cycle energy costs' including extraction, transportation/transmission, etc.

To look at the issue properly in a life-cycle context one has to look at it from a 'cradle to grave to cradle' point of view, not from a point where the thing is being fabricated, not counting all the inputs that need to go into it up to the point of fabrication. So the study didn't take into account the full life-cycle of extracting oil, transporting it, warehousing it, etc. in terms of the energy in the plastic cup.

The Canadian study assumed a 1994 electrically powered dishwasher with an average energy efficiency. Not a high efficiency dishwasher.

Nor is there any 'energy extraction' from the hot water that is exhausted from the dishwasher. We all know that we waste large quantities of energy everytime we pull the plug on the bathtub, or let hot water go down the drain from the shower, or the sink. If we had 'energy reuse equipment' fitted to the dishwasher drain, the results would be very different. (I expect that within 10 years every home and business will have 'energy extraction devices' hooked up to sink and shower drains.

Also, the study doesn't take into account the costs of landfilling the waste from the 'disposable' cups, nor the cost of trucking them to the landfill site. The energy required to prepare a landfill site and operate it, and the energy to transport large volumes of disposables is not trivial in our society.

Nor does the study include all the other environmental costs of the use of paper or oil-based disposables.

In Canada currently, we have exhausted much of the pulp and paper from the near north, and are now being urged to cut on the upper edge of the boreal.

Then there's the use of water.

The science of life-cycle assessment is still developing, and until we are able to accurately assess the 'full costs' of disposables, including disposal, including full extraction costs, etc. I am very doubtful about results that show reusables doing worse than disposables. Especially with energy efficient methods of maintaining (read "washing") the reusables. For example, using solar energy to heat the water, extracting energy from waste water, using waste water for irrigation, etc.