My church does a cool outreach for our community: an ESL class. We've been doing this for years, but here the "we" really means "they", because I haven't at all been part of it except for cheering. (Here's me cheering: Yay! Go, church!)
One of the actual volunteers with the ESL classes is a follower of this blog who has started an awesome sustainability Facebook page. Because of this, she and I got into an extended e-conversation about recycling styrofoam*, and in the course of this conversation, I learned that our ESL program uses styrofoam cups. This is horror. This is dreadful.
At any rate, I did a search at my newly-beloved Restaurant Store, and found some 8 oz melamine mugs that look nice and are semi-stackable. Here's a photo of some of them after they arrived -- I think they really do look good!
Cost:
I ordered 9 dozen (108 cups) for about $240 (that includes shipping). How does this compare to the price of the styrofoam cups? At first glance, bill for the mugs seems like a huge expense: it's possible to get 1000 styrofoam cups for only about $40. But if my ESL group uses 100 cups a week (which is about what we do right now), and if they meet about 30 times per year (which is about how often they meet right now), then these cups should recover their cost in only 2 years. That's not a bad ROI, really.
Stickers:
Oooh, I want to share something about removing stickers! Because in spite of me ordering these babies bulk, EVERY one of these cups came with a UPC sticker attached. At first, when I started peeling the stickers off, I got a lot of gummy residue and had to spend a bit of time picking and picking to get it off. But then I remembered that heat helps to loosen glue --- and the microwave is a great tool for adding a bit of heat. For example, when the charity envelopes that I save for about a year get gummy, 15 seconds in the microwave helps to "steam" them so I can carefully peel them open again. So I resorted to putting batches of a dozen cups in the microwave for about a minute, and when I took them out, I could peel the stickers off with almost no resistance. Lovely!
Storage:
Because my church doesn't have a dishwasher, we need a way for my Grasshopper to transport the mugs between the church and her home. There are probably better long-term solutions than the one I came up with, but I sort of like this as a first-attempt: a canvas beach bag that I snagged from a "free" pile after my neighborhood's summer yard sale.
Bonus: stackable toys
Each set of a dozen mugs came in a little cardboard box, somewhat larger than the size of a brick. These boxes make excellent stacking toys, and my granddaughter A-child has delighted in making towers that she can knock down with abandon, endangering no one in the process. So it turns out that if you buy 108 cups, you get a construction set for free. Awesome.
One of the actual volunteers with the ESL classes is a follower of this blog who has started an awesome sustainability Facebook page. Because of this, she and I got into an extended e-conversation about recycling styrofoam*, and in the course of this conversation, I learned that our ESL program uses styrofoam cups. This is horror. This is dreadful.
* The UPS Store near us recycles styrofoam packing peanuts,
but not other kinds of styrofoam.
There is a Dart Container company "near" us
(depending on your definition of "near")
that recycles other shapes of styrofoam.
At any rate, even if it gets recycled, styrofoam is a horrible burden on our fragile planet. So I decided to buy reusable cups for my church. My Miser Mom Grasshopper (she of the ESL volunteer/Sustainability page persuasion) has already volunteered to be the one to wash the cups each week, so that helped to make the decision to spring for cups an easy one for me. (Someone else is washing the dishes! Fantastic!)
Another aspect making my decision even easier is that an electronic accounting glitch canceled my August donation to my church, so I felt like I "owed" some money anyway, and why the heck not donate the money in the form of reusable mugs?
At any rate, I did a search at my newly-beloved Restaurant Store, and found some 8 oz melamine mugs that look nice and are semi-stackable. Here's a photo of some of them after they arrived -- I think they really do look good!Cost:
I ordered 9 dozen (108 cups) for about $240 (that includes shipping). How does this compare to the price of the styrofoam cups? At first glance, bill for the mugs seems like a huge expense: it's possible to get 1000 styrofoam cups for only about $40. But if my ESL group uses 100 cups a week (which is about what we do right now), and if they meet about 30 times per year (which is about how often they meet right now), then these cups should recover their cost in only 2 years. That's not a bad ROI, really.
 |
| 108 UPC codes on 108 stickers, now no longer on the cups. |
Oooh, I want to share something about removing stickers! Because in spite of me ordering these babies bulk, EVERY one of these cups came with a UPC sticker attached. At first, when I started peeling the stickers off, I got a lot of gummy residue and had to spend a bit of time picking and picking to get it off. But then I remembered that heat helps to loosen glue --- and the microwave is a great tool for adding a bit of heat. For example, when the charity envelopes that I save for about a year get gummy, 15 seconds in the microwave helps to "steam" them so I can carefully peel them open again. So I resorted to putting batches of a dozen cups in the microwave for about a minute, and when I took them out, I could peel the stickers off with almost no resistance. Lovely!
Storage:Because my church doesn't have a dishwasher, we need a way for my Grasshopper to transport the mugs between the church and her home. There are probably better long-term solutions than the one I came up with, but I sort of like this as a first-attempt: a canvas beach bag that I snagged from a "free" pile after my neighborhood's summer yard sale.
Bonus: stackable toys
Each set of a dozen mugs came in a little cardboard box, somewhat larger than the size of a brick. These boxes make excellent stacking toys, and my granddaughter A-child has delighted in making towers that she can knock down with abandon, endangering no one in the process. So it turns out that if you buy 108 cups, you get a construction set for free. Awesome.
 |
| Prewash demonstrates her burgeoning "sit. stay." skills next to the tower of stackable cardboard boxes. |
Sounds like a win all the way around, good job!
ReplyDeleteLet's hope it all works as planned!
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