No matter how environmentally friendly they try to be, there’s a huge built-in waste component to coffee shops with the whole disposable cup aspect. The more successful a coffee shop is, the more paper to-go cups you’re selling that will end up in landfills or the subway tracks or a recycling plant at best. But now in DUMBO, a team of students have introduced the concept of plastic reusable coffee cups that you give back to the coffee shop when you’re done. On the one hand, it costs $5 to get a cup and you have to carry the lid around with you. On the other hand, you can skip the line at participating shops and get 25 cents off, so would you throw down for one of these?
The Good to Go cups have been introduced as a pilot program in DUMBO at the Brooklyn Roasting Company, to see if people will actually use them. Instead of carrying around the whole plastic cup though, you just carry around the lid to the mug, after dropping the mug off either at the coffee shop or at a street kiosk.
Beyond the novelty of basically renting a coffee mug, there are some advantages to using the cup. For starters, buying into the system for $5 gets you a free cup of coffee that goes along with your sense of self-satisfaction for not throwing a cup away. Plus, as per Good to Go’s website explaining the whole thing, you get 25 cents off of coffee purchases if you show them your lid and you get your own fast line unlike the rest of the suckers throwing out paper cups.
The only issue we see at the moment would be if you’re walking through DUMBO to get to work, but you don’t actually work there. Then you end up carrying around this mug all day because you didn’t get a chance to return it to a kiosk. Well, that and if you forget to wipe off the lid off and your bag or pocket smells like coffee forever. But that, and $5, seem like small prices to pay to help the environment, no?
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why do you need to carry the lid? if you’re handing the cup back you should be able to hand the lid back as well.