The ritual of drinking coffee every morning has become essential for many people all over the world. While home coffee machines are popular, owning all of the tools to make advanced coffee drinks or even just a quality shot of espresso would cost too much time and money for people who aren’t heavily invested in the art of coffee making. To be able to make coffee and espresso you would need at least two machines, good beans, and a grinder if the beans aren’t pre–ground. For a milk drink like a latte or cappuccino you need a milk steamer, and a flavored latte requires flavored syrups. To rival results from a coffee shop, all of the equipment and ingredients need to be high quality, and even if you pay top dollar for your equipment and your beans are sourced from the best coffee roaster in the world, you have to know how to properly handle them. Even though many people complain about the expensive price of coffee from coffee shops, there is certainly value in buying prepared coffee for people without the means, expertise, or motivation to make it. Coffee shops also provide a welcoming environment that is perfect for reading, studying or catching up with friends. As a result of their attractive aesthetic, value, and massive demand for their product, coffee shops and chains have boomed all over the world. Unfortunately, their success leads to massive amounts of waste as 16 billion disposable paper cups are used each year. That number grows when accounting for disposable cups of other materials like plastic and Styrofoam. Most of the cups can’t even be recycled due to their laminated lining inside, so they either become litter on the street or reside in landfills.
The obvious solution is probably something you’ve already seen coffee shops doing—serving coffee to patrons in their own reusable mugs. Many coffee shops incentivize reusable mug use by offering a small discount of 25–cents or so on the coffee the customer purchases. While this solution is a promising start, it doesn’t come without challenges. For example, if a customer comes in with a dirty mug, the barista then either has to clean it, which takes time and disrupts their workflow, or serve coffee in a dirty mug, which reflects poorly on the shop. In addition, not all reusable travel mugs fit under standard coffee brewers. If someone wants brewed coffee from a carafe, it’s no big deal, but there is not enough clearance underneath an espresso machine brew head for the tall 20 oz. travel mugs that most people use. People are also discouraged from doing this because they don’t want to clean the mugs themselves after they’re done. A 25–cent discount is not enough to encourage people to supply and clean their reusable mugs, but coffee shops can’t afford to just start selling their coffee for less money, so what’s a solution?
HuskeeCup, an innovative reusable cup company, has an answer. They make a reusable coffee mug from recycled coffee husks, and it fits under most brewers with ease. While the product itself is quite nice the real benefit of the company is the HuskeeSwap sharing program. The idea is simple, yet brilliant. In the program, customers start by buying a new mug. Once they’ve done that all they have to do is remember to bring it with them next time they go to a participating café. If the cup is dirty, the café will exchange it for one that they’ve cleaned so as not to slow down workflow. When you’re done, you can clean it if you want to or just bring it right back to a participating café and receive a fresh HuskeeCup, filled with coffee. Similar exchange programs have been tried in Europe and Australia with KeepCups, a different reusable mug brand. While the idea could work, it still needs to be expanded to new markets and promoted. A huge company like Starbucks certainly has the resources to produce their own reusable cups for such a program if they don’t want to outsource those profits to other companies. If small businesses take the initiative to provide and promote coffee cup exchange programs, the disposable cup problem will finally be solved.