Coffee Rivals Join Forces to Fight for the Environment

Yeah, that's right. These guys aren't green with envy over their competitors. They're just green. Fast food honchos Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts and Tim Horton's have decided to put aside their rivalry (which, as reported by Tonic has been focused on the breakfast wars with strategies like introducing drive-thru oatmeal!) and instead focus on building a better coffee cup — a sustainable one.

There was a coffee cup summit at MIT on Earth Day "It's really a lot more complicated than people want to think. Everyone wants a magic bullet," said Peter M. Senge, a senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, which helped host the cup summit. "There really is no alternative to get these people working together. And you just keep pushing until you get to the real solution."

So what's so complicated about a sustainable coffee cup? Finding a java cup that's meets cost, performance and environmental standards is tricky. Many wax-covered paper cups are not really recyclable and even earth-friendly foams don't necessarily make the grade. And switching to paper isn't necessarily the easy answer it appears to be, since most communities don't provide a means of recycling coffee cups. Not to mention it takes 20 million trees and 12 billion gallons of water to create 58 billion coffee cups. One approach is that the coffee kings are using their joint strength to encourage paper mills that recycled coffee cups make good boxes. Sounds good to us.

Photo by philcampbell via Flickr.