How environmental friendly are you?

[V3]

Cup ?

This is how I typically drink water, open tap, hand under tap, water to mouth. The best way to enjoy water really.

Don't drink coffee or tea or other hot drinks, cause I hate them. Cold milk, juice and alchohol is straight from the bottle. I never understand why people need to drink from cup.

 

[Gerry]

Cup ?

This is how I typically drink water, open tap, hand under tap, water to mouth. The best way to enjoy water really.

Don't drink coffee or tea or other hot drinks, cause I hate them. Cold milk, juice and alchohol is straight from the bottle. I never understand why people need to drink from cup.

I would have thought it's blatantly obvious to be honest.

Off the top of my head....

1. Loads of people DO like drinking hot drinks. The fact you don't is neither here nor there.
2. Drinking water from straight from the tap means you have to drink all you want at once, or else keep making that trip back and forward until you've had enough.
3. If you're sharing a carton/bottle with multiple people then it's neither convenient or hygenic to each go gulping down from the same recepticle.
4. Some cartons aren't exactly designed for scuh behaviour. How would you go about drinking straight from a wine box without looking an idiot?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the fact you don't use a cup is odd, but the fact you can't understand why other people would is weird.

 

[RudeCurve]

Also using your hands to cup water isn't hygenic at all which means you'd have to wash your hands before drinking which means instead of washing a cup you'd be washing your hands.

 

[Grall]

Cold milk, juice and alchohol is straight from the bottle.

Hard liquor too?

I never understand why people need to drink from cup.

Well for one because steaming hot tea is fuckin painful to drink straight out of the pot, mate...

Also, milk over here don't come in bottles. It comes in 1-2 liter carton containers which aren't particulary convenient to drink out of. Also, as soon as you put your lips to the opening of the milk container you introduce bacteria into the milk, so unless you chug down milk like a sonofabitch you're going to shorten its shelf-life considerably or possibly give yourself food poisoning.

 

[V3]

Also using your hands to cup water isn't hygenic at all which means you'd have to wash your hands before drinking which means instead of washing a cup you'd be washing your hands.

Well skip the hand then. With hand its just much faster to gulp the water. But if my hand is dirty, I would gulp the running water instead. Happy ?

 

[V3]

Hard liquor too?

Yep from the bottle. Though I don't drink alchohol that often.

Well for one because steaming hot tea is fuckin painful to drink straight out of the pot, mate...

Well let it cool down abit then drink it once you can gulp it down from the pot. Or drink iced tea.

Also, milk over here don't come in bottles. It comes in 1-2 liter carton containers which aren't particulary convenient to drink out of. Also, as soon as you put your lips to the opening of the milk container you introduce bacteria into the milk, so unless you chug down milk like a sonofabitch you're going to shorten its shelf-life considerably or possibly give yourself food poisoning.

I normally drink from 3L bottle over 3 days without it going bad. Actually I never had milk that went bad at me, unless I left it there past the use by date. So wouldn't worry as long as it is refrigerated.

 

[RudeCurve]

In my house we share milk, fruit juice etc so its more economical to buy in larger containers which means we cannot drink from the bottle. Since we prefer not to drink each others' "backwash" we do not allow drinking straight from the container.

As for gulping straight from the faucet...well there's this thing called the sink that gets in the way of your head when you try to do that..at least in my house. Yes we could install a separate bypass nozzle but it's just more complexity for a non-problem. Also some of us prefer ice water in the summer so a glass or cup is required.

 

[Mintmaster]

There are some huge assumptions here.

First of all, I use a ceramic/glass cup hundreds of times before it breaks, so 70 times more energy is meaningless.

More importantly, I don't fill a sink with water when washing them (I actually think that method is rather gross, as you're dipping dishes in dirty water and even see it in the dish tray). I use a dribble of water and scrub/soap all the dishes, then just use running water to rinse away the soap. It totals a max of maybe 1L of water per cup, half of which is heated with maybe 50 kJ of heat.

Styrofoam is the most energy efficient disposable, and uses a good 200 kJ of electricity per cup (which in turns needs maybe 600 kJ of heat). So no, paper/styrofoam aren't even close to being as efficient. Burning garbage creates lots of air pollution, too.

A dishwasher could be more water efficient if I was in a bigger household, but still better than disposables.

 

[Frank]

http://www.starbucks.com/blog/used-paper-cups-become-new-again/624

Starbucks uses recycled paper for its cups.

Yes, they spend lots of money on "feel good".

What's your point? It won't be more efficient or economical friendly.

 

[Frank]

"Simply because a ceramic cup takes about 70 times the energy to produce than a styrofoam one"

Produce? Or produce, transport to place of usage, transport away as garbage, etc.?!

A ceramic cup can be used many more than 70 times of course.

Yes.

The thing is, simply cleaning it takes more energy and resources than all that with a styrofoam cup.

See these things can quickly get ridiculous if you choose to focus on just one element in the chain.

 

[Frank]

Frank, everyones still waiting for your citations/proof

Lazy? Because everyone knows I'm wrong?

I'll think about it.

 

[Grall]

The thing is, simply cleaning it takes more energy and resources than all that with a styrofoam cup.

No wai!

 

[Frank]

I use a dribble of water and scrub/soap all the dishes, then just use running water to rinse away the soap. It totals a max of maybe 1L of water per cup, half of which is heated with maybe 50 kJ of heat.

Depending, I'll wager you can make and transport multiple styrofoam cups with that amount of energy.

 

[Mintmaster]

The thing is, simply cleaning it takes more energy and resources than all that with a styrofoam cup.

Except it doesn't. See above.

 

[Mintmaster]

Depending, I'll wager you can make and transport multiple styrofoam cups with that amount of energy.

I hope you're not a betting man. You lost your wager in the next sentence that I wrote.

 

[Frank]

No wai!

Styrofoam is incredibly cheap. You can buy about 25 kilograms of it for a few Euro's. Which will expand to about 30 times it's size when extruded.

 

[Frank]

I hope you're not a betting man. You lost your wager in the next sentence that I wrote.

Ah. You mean, the water, transport, heater and fuel are free?

 

[AlphaWolf]

still waiting for a citation that backs up any of this

and yes you're wrong.

 

[Mintmaster]

Ah. You mean, the water, transport, heater and fuel are free?

The fraction used to wash a cup? Pretty much.

1L of water and its transport cost around $0.001. Heater cost is a fraction of the fuel that goes through it in its lifetime, and 50kJ needs about $0.001 of natural gas (assuming 50% efficiency and including delivery charges).

You need 200kJ to make a styrofoam cup. The energy alone would cost $0.005, and I'm not including material cost, delivery cost, disposal cost, etc. There's a reason that they cost several cents each.

Paper needs water too, so you're wrong on that front as well.

 

[Grall]

Styrofoam is incredibly cheap. You can buy about 25 kilograms of it for a few Euro's.

For a few euros you get literally TONS of water over here to wash the same ceramic cup with.

Look... This is pointless. There's no way that using throwaway petroleum cups can have less of an environmental impact than a reusable cup. The more throwaway cups you use the bigger the impact you're going to have, it speaks for itself.

In the case of Sweden where I live, almost none of the electric energy used comes from fossiles, and the hot water in my building and a huge part of the rest of the city is heated in two thermo-electric powerstations run by household garbage/wood pellet incinerators.

The ole styrofoam cup however whose raw materials may have travelled from halfway across the globe before it even became a cup (which then may have to travel across a whole continent or more as a very bulky, low-density product in order to reach me) is looking less and less viable as an option...