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Changing our habits beyond reusable cups and containers is what will really help the environment

By Carol Rääbus
Woman holding coffee cup in front of wall
If you don't get takeaway coffee very often, a compostable disposable option might be better than the reusable one. Maybe… it's complicated.(Unsplash: Marion Michele)

Like many Australians, I try to do the "right thing" for the environment while still living a regular lifestyle in (the increasingly hipsterfied) Hobart.

I use a reusable cup for takeaway coffee, have a selection of non-plastic bags I take grocery shopping, and try to make choices to buy things with as little packaging as possible.

But a quick look into whether these behaviours are really the "right things" to be doing left me depressed, discouraged and feeling defeated.

Australia's recycling systems still rely heavily on shipping our waste to other countries for them to deal with.

Since China largely stopped accepting our waste in 2018, this has meant much of what could be recycled is being sent to landfill or is sitting in stockpiles, waiting for something to happen.

While we know single-use plastics contribute to pollution and have been linked to killing seabirds (and just about everything else), replacing one plastic with another without thinking about how we use these products isn't necessarily much better in the long run.

Trevor Thornton, from Deakin University's School of Life and Environmental Sciences, has written about the commonly asked "how many times do you need to reuse a shopping bag" question for The Conversation.

"There's no black and white answer," he says.

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Is a reusable cup best? It's complicated

Four takeaway Coffee cups on a cafe bench
If you can't get through the day without caffeine, these are unlikely to be the best option for the environment.(ABC Radio Perth: Emma Wynne)

Dr Thornton says to really know what impact an item — whether a car, a piece of clothing or a plastic bag — has on the planet you have to look at the full life-cycle: how and from what it's made of, how it's used, and what happens to it when you don't need it anymore.

Like mine, your coffee cup may be made from recycled materials, but how you use it affects how truly sustainable it is.

"With reusable cups, a lot of the environmental burden comes from using hot water and detergents [to wash it]," Dr Thornton says.

As with everything else we own, each time you wash a cup there is an environmental impact.

That impact depends on whether you use hot or cold water, whether your hot water comes from coal-power electricity or hydro or solar, what types of detergents you use, whether you're on tank water, have a septic tank, how much water you use, how often you wash it and on and on.

So if you're in Victoria, where coal power is the main source of electricity, and you wash your cup with detergents, it might actually be better for the environment to use a compostable disposable cup, and put the plastic lid in the recycling.

But again, it also depends how many coffees you have in a day, whether you wash that cup each time or only rinse it in between uses and so on and so on.


In other words, once you start stepping through the impact of your actions, it very quickly becomes apparent why it's so difficult to provide a definitive answer.

Or as Dr Thornton says: "It's difficult to say for the population as a whole; 'this is the better one'."

For what it's worth, Dr Thornton (who lives in Victoria) does have a reusable coffee cup and is still in favour of people being conscious of anything single-use.

He calls reusable cups "gateway items": if people start to care about their coffee cups, they often move on to care about other stuff they use, too.

The move away from single-use plastic products

Plastic takeaway boxes
With food delivery services just a couple of taps away on your phone, it's easy for the takeaway containers start to pile up.(ABC Radio Perth: Emma Wynne)

Jamie Forsyth started by caring about coffee cups. He cared so much he founded one of the major reusable takeaway coffee cup companies with his sister Abigail in 2007.

He has since left that business and is now working — to the relief of anyone who has guiltily thrown away bagfuls of home-delivery packaging — on a new business model to change our habits with takeaway food containers.

"I just can't take all that packaging now. It's outrageous," he says.

Speaking about his reusable cup business, Jamie says one of the things he's most proud of is knowing it has helped make people think more deeply about their consumption.

"I know it's spawned a whole lot of ideas around reuse, not just in food service and coffee, but in every industry," Jamie says.

Jamie's new venture centres on a returnable metal bowl for takeaway food.

The idea is you pay a deposit to use the metal bowl, which you get back when the bowl is returned.

The bowl itself is stainless steel that's made of high levels of recycled materials and has high value as a recyclable material when its useful life is over. It's also insulated, making it a better alternative to current takeaway container options.

"One part of it is to replace the plastic packaging, but the other part is to try and make the eating experience better," Jamie says.

For Jamie, the sign of success will be when single-use containers are no longer the norm for takeaway food.

The goal of a garbage-less future

A woman and man smiling and standing near a kitchen bench with the trashless takeaway website on a laptop
Nyssa and Kim Maisch started Trashless Takeaway to help people find businesses that will accept BYO containers.(Supplied: Tim Grimsey)

This is also the aim of Kim and Nyssa Maisch, a couple in Hobart who started a website called Trashless Takeaway to help Australians get in the habit of saying no to single-use packaging.

The idea came when the Maischs had their first son.

"We were struggling for time and started getting more takeaway than we used to," Nyssa says.

The plastic takeaway containers started to pile up and Nyssa says she couldn't get a clear answer as to whether this type of plastic could be recycled or not.

"We started taking our own containers to get takeaway," she says.

While most of the businesses they went to were fine to put their food in the Maischs' containers, some weren't keen.

This inspired them to start a free online guide to businesses nation-wide that used or accepted reusable containers, giving customers the ability to check before being told no.

Cafes or restaurants can nominate themselves or be identified by customers (with verification from the businessowner) as being happy to accept reusable packaging.

"We're up to about a 1,000 [listings] now, in about a year," Kim says.

While the main aim of the site is to encourage businesses and consumers to stop using single-use containers, it includes other sustainability ranking systems.

"Do they compost their organics? Do they use renewable energy? Do they have biodegradable container options for takeaway? Where do they source their produce?" Kim says.

"We haven't given that too much prominence on the site, but maybe if reusable containers become the norm, then it gives us something to go on with on the website."

One year after the website launched, Hobart City Council voted to ban single-use plastics in all food takeaway services, so maybe it will meet its goal sooner rather than later.

As Dr Thornton says, by first caring about the bowl our fried rice comes in, the next step is caring about where the rice is from and what happens to the leftovers.

While I now know my reusable coffee cup isn't saving the planet, at least I can do some small things to start making a change.

Maybe we're not quite so doomed after all. If we can change our coffee habits, who knows what we else we can do.