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 2 Comments

• Re: Commercial CBSM

  2015-06-01 12:23:50 UTC

  Anya,
  My organization does not support Google docs and I am unable to review any information that has been posted. Would there be some other way of posting information?
  Mary
  
  Mary Lindemuth
  Commercial Recycling Coordinator
  City of Sunnyvale
  United States
  

• Re: Reusable Mugs for Public Coffee Stations

  2013-12-08 12:44:49 UTC

  Hi, Lauren,
  I work for a city and have been actively trying to reduce disposable cup use. While we do have an organics program, our compost facility doesn't really want them. Plus there are, of course, the upstream as well as downstream impacts that we would like to avoid.
  
  My public mug experience is with our HR training room. I provided about 30 recycled glass mugs to replace the disposable cups that were constantly purchased and thrown away. Within a month HR called me to request more mugs as people seemed to be leaving with them.
  
  We drilled down a little bit to see what the barriers were to leaving the mugs in the room. First, we discovered that people really liked the mugs and thought they were pretty nice (a lovely cobalt blue with a message stating "Made from recycled glass!"). There was no dedicated place to return the mugs. Seeing them as free, they took them back to their desks in other buildings. To help people re-think, we set up a return area with a sign, "Return mugs here". Telling people what to do helped slow the loss.
  
  At some point the inventory significantly decreased and HR staff began supplementing with paper cups. We observed that when people were given a choice between disposable and reusable, they uniformly selected the paper cups, which we found puzzling as we are a zero waste city and have a fairly robust employee recycling program with regular waste reduction messaging. Again drilling down we found that people who selected the paper cups felt that they were helping out HR staff who might be stuck with the chore of washing the mugs. No one wants to wash dishes! We re-jiggered the coffee area to move the disposables out of easy reach and displayed the durable mugs more prominently. Our suggestion was that an announcement be made at the outset of trainings to alert staff to the presence of the durable mugs, invite them to use the mugs and to please return at session end. There is no data yet to see if this has increased durable use or slowed the loss of inventory.
  
  As for having to retrieve mugs in the retail setting, I would guess that store employees would need to recover dirty durable mugs as I frequently see disposable cups left on store shelves anyway. Hope our experience helps!
  Best,
  Mary
  
  Mary Lindemuth
  Commercial Recycling Coordinator
  City of Sunnyvale
  United States

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