How do you get an office to stop using Styrofoam coffee cups when they had problems with dirty re-usable mugs in the past?

One of my co-workers asked me yesterday what my thoughts were on switching to more expensive biodegradable cups.  Here is my response:

The classic “Reduce – Reuse – Recycle” concept is the best way to approach this, in that order.

Reduce:
Encourage employees to use fewer cups (or none at all!)
Best accomplished by putting up a printout next to the cups about the environmental/health effects of Styrofoam with something like this from Grinning Planet:

“Styrofoam, which is generically known as polystyrene, is bad news for the environment and for your health.  In the environment, polystyrene is extremely non-biodegradable and breaks down very slowly. But as it does break down, it can leach styrene—the single-molecule form of polystyrene—into groundwater. If your trashed Styrofoam cup somehow finds its way into a nearby body of water, it can eventually break up into small pieces, with the pieces being ingested by marine animals. None of the above environmental effects are good, but the health effects of drinking from polystyrene cups are even worse. The styrene in the cup migrates into the liquid and gets into your body as you sip your beverage. Hot, fatty, acidic, or alcoholic beverages increase the rate of styrene migration. ”

You don’t have to encourage employees to bring in their own mugs; seeing this sort of information may be convincing enough!

Switch to cups that are made from less environmentally-damaging materials.

Both of the links (1 and 2) to cups you included look good – pretty much anything is better than Styrofoam. And again, if there is some sort of print-out that talks about how these cups are biodegradeable but still require resources to produce, I would guess that most employees would not be so wasteful, and your costs would be recouped.

 Reuse:

A couple simple facts about waste, and resources next to the cups and a couple suggestions for how to minimize their impacts may be enough to get employees to start re-using the same cup, or bringing their own.

I.e. these facts, again from Grinning Planet:
” *  Employees:  Bring in a mug! … and quit using Styrofoam cups, period. This is an easy one!
* Visitors:  For visitors, it’s a little more complicated. Perhaps your company will spring for a few dozen mugs that bear the company logo; or, if the budget is limited, maybe just plain white mugs. If an order of any type of new mugs is simply unaffordable, ask each employee to bring in an old mug or two to start a pool of mugs for visitors to use. Ask people to only bring in mugs that are not embarrassingly stained or chipped. (An no pottery-class rejects, please!) It’s also a good idea to get employees to agree among themselves on a system for ensuring that the mugs get washed and put away after meetings.”

 Recycle:
Even if you don’t go with biodegradable, paper mugs will be better for the environment and health-wise. And you can recycle them. Recycling isn’t all it is cracked up to be since it still takes a lot of resources to recycle then create a new cup, but it is better than just throwing it away.

Hope this helps some others facing this issue!