Andrew Brooks isn’t the first business person to gaze upon his years of entrepreneurial obsession and think: “I wish I could go back in time and meet myself and say, ‘Don’t do this.’”
By “this” he means his determination to redesign those bulky, environmentally friendly, reusable coffee mugs into a collapsible, tuck-it-in-your-pocket version. “What the world seems to need is a reusable cup that’s easy to carry around,” he says on the phone from the U.K., where there’s growing uproar over the mountains of single use, throwaway coffee cups that are not recycled.
Perhaps, Brooks surmised, a cup that collapsed when not in use could help wean consumers from their habit of buying their takeout coffee in polyethylene-lined paper cups, the vast majority of which end up in landfill.
Four years ago Brooks was in Tofino (he’s a Canadian citizen), where his mind wandered from a fishing holiday to thoughts of logging. Most consumers are unaware that their takeaway coffee cups resist recycling because of their impermeable lining. Most consumers would be equally surprised to learn that the paper cup itself is commonly made from virgin fibre. In the U.K. it is estimated that 2.5 billion coffee cups are tossed into the trash annually. The high quality fibre demanded in their manufacture equates to the felling of 100,000 trees.
In a recent piece in the Guardian, a professor of materials resources engineering at Imperial College London estimated that the plastic liner could take about 30 years to break down, and even that was a guess because, he told the Guardian, “nobody has looked at the cup specifically.”
Take the polyethylene out of the equation and you’ve still got a second environmental problem. “In terms of environmental impact the cellulose fibre is potentially more of an issue than the plastic,” Chris Cheeseman told the paper. “This could take 18 months to two years to start to break down and then it produces methane gas, which is probably not collected.”
In Toronto, the true size of the latte cup challenge is unknown. The city estimates that 1,300 tonnes of hot beverage cups are managed through the waste stream annually, but that figure is drawn from an audit of multi-residential and single family waste management numbers. Asked for the industrial side of the equation, a spokesperson informs that Solid Waste provides collection for only about 14,500 small businesses.
Has there been a full audit of all waste collection? Not that I can find. According to the spokesperson, under the province’s new Waste-Free Ontario Act “staff will be working with the Province to determine if and how hot drink coffee cups can be added to municipal blue bin programs.”
For Andrew Brooks, a recyclable paper cup is not the answer — and the technological struggles experienced in the U.K. by companies attempting to separate the lining from the cup in recycling support this view. A summertime episode of the hugely popular U.K. series Hugh’s War on Waste, hosted by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, reported that the recycling effects were miniscule.
So Brooks set his sights on nothing less than behavioural change. What if he could create a reusable cup that actually held consumer appeal? The existing versions are great if you’re driving, he says. “But if you’re in a big city and you’re commuting, the Shanghais, the New Yorks, the Londons of this world, the reusables aren’t the best.”
He didn’t expect it would take years to develop the Pokito, a cup made of synthesized rubber that adjusts to three sizes and smacks flat when not in use. He recalls a canoe trip through Algonquin Park, and how when he tested an early iteration of the cup, it was too hot to handle around the middle. So that meant reworking the middle band, which meant retooling, an expensive 18-month setback. The engineering meant reworking not millimetres of material, but tenths of a millimetre.There was a great deal of trial and error involved.
“We must have trialled 15 or 20 different materials,” he says. It had to be odourless, safe and able to withstand that British cuppa made with boiling water. The result, he says, is stable, insulated, attractive and incredibly durable.
The Pokito is colourful and fun — and Brooks has placed them in a few London coffee shops. He’s hoping to launch on Kickstarter soon, looking to raise $25,000 or so, to get the Pokito into production.
Of course it’s a gamble. And of course there have been moments when he wondered whether it’s been worth it. But as Brooks points out, change is going to come. For the sake of the planet, it has to.