How can a disposable cup reduce waste?

Slideshow photo credit: Ian Sane

Do you want room for cream?

It’s a simple enough question, but one that gets more complicated when considering how much coffee gets poured into the trash every day to make space for milk and cream. 

It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of coffee beans. That means every ounce of poured-out coffee equals about eight gallons of wasted water, according to the creators of a new disposable cup that aims to save water by eliminating the need to dump excess coffee.

The R4 System, created by Sector Labs, a San Francisco product and concept development firm, is just specially printed compostable cups with numbers on the side so customers can indicate how full they want their drinks.

Given that Americans drink almost half a billion cups of coffee every day, those numbers can add up to significant water savings.

“The concept is to save potable water,” says Allen King, president of Excellent Packaging & Supply, a Bay Area distribution company specializing in compostable foodservice packaging, which is partnering with Sector Labs on the R4 System. 

Sector Labs and Excellent Packaging spent about a year working together to hone the concept and develop a go-to-market plan for the R4 System. They started testing the cups in a San Francisco coffee shop a few months ago.

Now they’re working to market and sell the cups, starting by placing them in Excellent’s biomass packaging catalog and marketing them under the Room For brand. For now the cups sell at a slight cost premium, about the same price as custom-printed cups. Eventually, King says, the plan is to market the R4 System to cup manufacturers, who would pay a licensing fee.

Of course, the most sustainable solution is for coffee drinkers to bring their own mugs, rather than relying on disposable options. That raises the question of whether to push for larger behavior change, or to minimize the environmental impacts of people's current consumption patterns.

King says the R4 System is an immediate and realistic way to mitigate waste. 

“We live in a world where disposable packaging is a reality,” he says. “We need to start where we’re at now.”