Do you serve clients hot coffee in your waiting room? Do you sell a hot beverage product? Is your office trying to get away from Styrofoam cups?
There are a number of promotional item manufacturers working with corn based plastic cups for cool and cold liquids. As I have mentioned before I think these cups are a great idea as a replacement for plastic cups at ballgames, festivals and the like.
The argument is that large events create a lot of trash. Using corn based disposable cups reduces the impact of that waste because unlike petroleum based cups, these corn cups biodegrade in a managed composting facility in about 90 days.
So what about hot liquids? Tranter Graphics – one of the manufacturers of the clear corn cups – is now offering a solid disposable cup designed for hot liquids in 10oz, 12oz and 16oz models. I encourage all ecopreneurists that run a business using disposable cups to take a look at these items.
Why? Well let me use a statistic from Tranter Graphics to answer that. They point out that combined individual consumers in the United States use about 40 billion paper and 35 billion plastic and foam cold cups every year. 16 billion paper hot cups and 25 billion foam hot cups are also used in the United States every year. That is a lot of trash. We have to start fixing these somewhere.
Yes, simply not using disposable cups is ideal, however if disposable is going to be used, compostable cups have to be the way to go.
Tranter Graphic markets their cup under the name ecotainer™, with a little “e”. The units are BPI certified, the ecotainer™ received certification from the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) on August 4, 2006. (The BPI is an independent organization that reviews and certifies products as meeting ASTM D6400 specifications for compostability.)
Adventures in Green Marketing 