Are you a fruit juggler? Maybe a vegetable balancer?
You know the types. The ones who are a little hung up about the whole plastic bag ban to the extent any bag is a bad bag. They slowly move around the veggie department of their local store and either load their basket as if picking produce on a farm, or juggle three carrots, four apples, one lime, and two avocados.
They scurry to the checkout and dump their bounty and watch as it rolls across the counter and onto the floor.
And why do fruit jugglers avoid bags as if they were rolled COVID? Because we’ve been indoctrinated, we all have, to believe that bags are evil. And should we use one, we will go straight to plastic bag hell.
If the City of Victoria has its way, this same logic of banning bags will apply to coffee cups.
City staff have provided a report (available on the city’s website) to Victoria council. Today, council plans to discuss the report as part of a plan to ban all single-use items (of which category my wife puts me, so I know my days are numbered).
From the City’s point of view, single use means knives, forks, spoons, straws, containers, and coffee cups. Which reminds me I need to dust off my Spork.
City staff estimate Victorians throw out 75,000 single use items every day. Of that, it’s about 13,000 coffee cups every day.
Mayor Lisa Helps refers to Tofino, which banned single-use plastics and cups. Now in Tofino your “to-go” coffee comes in a non-coated paper cup with a paper lid. Which gives you about 13 minutes to drink up before it dissolves in your hands. Which are covered in the burrito you never got a fork for.
Victoria’s take on this is the implementation of a tax on coffee cups of 25 cents. In theory, it will stop people from taking coffee to go or make coffee shops invest in reusable cups.
That is simply the wrong way to go about it. While there are the fruit jugglers out there, and it’s quite fun watching them unload their harvest onto the counter, people still use the bags in the veggie department (I use them to pack up all my groceries) or buy one at checkout.
The City of Victoria should look across the vast waters toward Vancouver. Last fall, the 8th annual Coffee Cup Revolution took place.
The brainchild of Binners Project — binnersproject.org — created a coffee cup refund system. In three hours, 96,285 coffee cups were collected. Which is to say, diverted from going to landfill.
And the people who collect the cups and lids and get the money?
The homeless and residents of the Eastside.
Genius. It’s a win-win. The city cuts down on cups going to landfill, those in need get some cash. And the various business have not lost business or money in having to purchase reusable mugs.
The Binners Project estimates 2.6 million coffee cups are tossed in Vancouver each week. They hope to have the refund policy instated year-round. The project is sponsored by the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Business Association, and some well minded businesses.
Over here in little old fruit-juggling Victoria, taxing the problem isn’t smart. How’d that turn out for gas consumption?
I like to call myself a conscious environmentalist. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds good.
And I’m a lover of all things coffee.
Given the limiting social lifestyle the pandemic has wrought, going out for coffee and hence with a coffee in hand, is a wonderful treat. The City of Victoria needs to be more creative.
Don’t just tax and hope the problem disappears. It’s kind of like building a bike lane and thinking the whole city will switch to bikes.
At a minimum, put in coffee cup specific recycling collection boxes. Here’s a thought — put them right in front of the coffee shops!
Then ponder what the Binners Project has done in Vancouver. It will take some work to pull it off, but the result will be worthwhile.
If people know a cup will be collected or will help someone much less fortunate, they will hold on to the cup to make sure it gets into the right hands or the right bin.
