coffee cups

Experiment conducted/recorded for the purpose of my DDes dissertation:

Going to that corner café—which is the same as the other corner café—I can save ten cents on the price of my hot drink if I bring my personal portable and reusable cup, often made of a washable material. Or I could sit there, drink a first coffee and get a refill for fifty cents less. I could sit there. But I usually get my fix on my way to the office, and finish it sited at my desk, eyes fixed on my screen. As I am a rather heavy drinker of caffeinated beverages, I consume partly on the go an average of seventeen cups a week. So let’s say if the cup which is composed of a cup, a lid, and an insulating sleeve costs ten cents, I could save a dollar and seventy cents a week, three dollars and forty cents in two weeks, five dollars and ten cents in three weeks… etc… Enough to buy a cup, and avoid an irritating feel of guilt about polluting the environment. [1] I have made the experiment; the volume occupied by seventeen cups—yet not stacked—on my eighty by two hundred centimeters desk is rather alarming.

I should buy a re-usable cup. Yet I might want to look at how much energy it takes to recycle a plastic cup as opposed to seventeen paper cups. Both material originated at some point from nature, but who knows what they were before? As John McHale writes in The Plastic Parthenon “The metals in a cigarette lighter today maybe, variously, within a month or a year, part of an auto, a lipstick case or an orbiting satellite. Such accelerated turnover of materials in manufacture underlines the relative temporality of all ‘permanent’ artifacts.” [2] So nothing is really permanent and the urban nomad that I am still has to wash her cup, if I choose to get a re-usable one.

Yet I would like to get a cup that is not cumbersome, because of all the “gears” that I “have to” carry, a laptop, a portable phone, my iPod Nano which can contain four Giga of digitally recorded music, all items in fact storing heavy—to me—information. These are already too many objects to carry as an acquaintance was telling me, “I am still looking for a beautifully Mac-like designed small phone that is user friendly, that enables me to call, connect, listen to my music with wireless headsets (insisting on the wireless headset), photograph and record video with a decent quality (at least four megapixels).” Still I search online for a weightless cup. I find one through an online outdoor store. The Orikaso fold-flat cup is, I quote, “Superlight, 1.3-ounce (37g), ultra-compact, easy cleaning, and unbreakable, Precreased, folding panels with locking, leakproof tabs create an easily constructed cup, Dishwasher safe, 7.6-fluid-ounce (225 ml) capacity, Nonstick material.” [3] It will cost me roughly four dollars, approximately two weeks and a half of paper cups use… all what I need. Yet I will have to wash it. And I do not carry/possess a dishwasher. Maybe as my colleague obviously a fan of Formula 1 suggested to me, I could have a kind of fold-flat cup with peel-off layers, like the ones racers have on their visors for constant clear vision. I am convinced the layer is so thin, that is less damage for the environment. How bio-degradable it is? This is another question.

[1] Feel of guilt instigated by society, the one which also promotes consumerism.
[2] John MacHale, The Plastic Parthenon, in Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste (London; Studio Vista, 1969); p. 103
[3] Search Orikaso at http://www.ems.com/ accessed December 1st, 2005