Oakland, CA company, Blue Bottle Coffee announced plans to do away with single-use cups at two Bay Area cafes as it prepares to go zero waste at its nearly 70 U.S. locations by the end of next year. Customers will either need to bring their own mug, order drinks for-here or put down a deposit for a reusable cup they can exchange for a clean one on their next visit or return for their deposit. That’ll start early next year at a new unnamed San Francisco location and an existing cafe in the East Bay, though Blue Bottle declined to announce the specific locations. If these pilots are successful, Blue Bottle plans to spread the single-use cup ban to other cafes.
“Blue Bottle is not trying to dictate how you live your life. Blue Bottle is trying to challenge you to think about your consumption,” said CEO Bryan Meehan.
Climate change prompted Meehan’s quest to eliminate single-use cups and other disposable packaging from Blue Bottle, including bags for coffee beans. The company goes through an estimated 12 million disposable cups every year in the U.S., and even though they’re made of bioplastics and are 100% compostable, many end up in landfills because customers throw them in trash cans.
While there are different definitions of “zero waste,” Blue Bottle ascribes to one laid out by Zero Waste International Alliance, which recommends a target of 90% waste diversion and doesn’t count successfully composted products, such as leftover pastries or paper napkins, as waste. TRUE (Total Resource Use and Efficiency), the zero-waste arm of Green Business Certification Inc., will certify Blue Bottle’s cafes in 2021, assuming all goes according to plan.