LIBS1910 The Advantage of the Reusable Cups

Agriculture, hunting, fishing, and forestry must be properly managed
• Poor agriculture processes can lead to loss of usable land, and the pollution of water supplies from fertilizer/manure runoff.
• Deforestation can lead to land erosion and removes habitat for many forest species.
• Overfishing can lead to endangered species and downstream food-chain impacts
• Mining for metals or coal has left great scars on the land from open pit mining
• Tunneling leaves heaps of sterile tailings and when the mines are abandoned can pollute groundwater for generations.
• Metals mining and refining, along with other industrial processes have polluted many
streams. 

You may not talk to anyone during the game or communicate with hand or facial gestures.
• The pennies belong to all of you—to the group.
• For each round, players will choose, one-at-a-time, how many pennies they would like to take, up to a maximum of 3 pennies. Each subsequent round will reverse the order.
• You may not put pennies back into the pool once you have taken them out.
• At the end of each round, I will double the number of pennies left in the pool (up to a maximum of 30), and then we will continue the game.
• There will never be more pennies in the pool than there were at the start of the game. This is the maximum number of pennies the pool can hold.

Answer:

Every year billions of disposable coffee cups both manufactured using paper and plastics end up in landfills across the globe. Paper cups were preferred due to their biodegradability, however, they must be manufactured with non-biodegradable plastic lining (Poortinga & Whitaker, 2018). Equally, paper coffee cups meant increased deforestation as trees were to be intensively cut down to manufacture the biodegradable and disposable paper cups. In addition, the main disadvantage of the cheaply disposable plastic cups is their non-biodegradable nature. Therefore, reusable coffee cups are alternative to paper and other disposable plastic coffee cups.

The advantage of the reusable cups is that they are reused over and over and recycled hence reducing the amount of non-biodegradable disposable coffees cups that end up into landfills polluting the  environment as well as ending up in water bodies increasing the ocean plastic patches in addition to affecting the quality of aquatic life and health (Poortinga & Whitaker, 2018).

            Nonetheless, despite reusable coffee cups being environmentally friendly they contribute to the circular materials economy. The circular material economy disregards the liner material economy as depicted by the disposable coffee cups; the reusable coffee cups are part of the circular material economy because it encourages recycling and re-uses hence limiting waste (Mestre & Cooper, 2017). The reusable coffee cups are often manufactured from silicone and plastic materials which as durable hence reusable for long despite being non-biodegradable.

References

Mestre, A., & Cooper, T. (2017). Circular Product Design. A Multiple Loops Life Cycle Design Approach for the Circular Economy. The Design Journal, 20(Sup 1), S1620-S1635.

Poortinga, W., & Whitaker, L. (2018). Promoting the Use of Reusable Coffee Cups through Environmental Messaging, the Provision of Alternatives and Financial Incentives. Sustainability, 10(3), 873-882.