Go green with Tully’s ‘green cup’

Published 3:01 pm Wednesday, November 7, 2007

It makes sense, when treating yourself to gourmet coffee on the town, to bring your own mug or cup.

Mugs with lids keep your coffee hotter longer. They’re eco-chic, they’re way less wasteful and you usually get a 10-cent discount on your drink too, which, if you indulge coffee every day, adds up to $36.50 annually.

With your own mug or cup, you don’t have to worry about how your paper coffee cup was manufactured or the billions paper cups trashed every year.

But, of course, sometimes you forget. (I keep a few in my car, but even that doesn’t always work.)

Fortunately, when you buy your drink from Tully’s Coffee, you’ll be supporting “the first major coffee retailer to adopt a fully renewable and compostable paper cup for its hot beverages.”

Tully’s green cup or “ecotainer” from International Paper has been certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute and is allegedly “100 percent compostable.” Unlike conventional paper cups lined with plastic to prevent leaking, Tully’s new “ecotainer” is lined with a bio-plastic made from corn, which is a renewable resource.

Cedar Grove Composting, a company with large operations in Everett and Maple Valley, will put Tully’s green cup to the test in a pilot program from now until the end of the year to see if the cups will indeed break down in their high-tech, high-heat systems.

“We should know by January,” said Cedar Grove vice president Jerry Bartlett. “We test everything. We only approve certain products.”

While some paper products boast that they are biodegradable and compostable, that doesn’t mean much if those products don’t break down in a timely matter at places such as Cedar Grove or, in a worst-case scenario, in a landfill, where the biodegrading process slows down dramatically.

Even Cedar Grove has had trouble trying to compost a variety of products marketed as biodegradable and compostable.

“The problem with most cups is they’re actually lined with plastic. Those cups we won’t want at all,” Bartlett said, who is optimistic about the corn-based lining of the Tully’s new green cups.

Are you already a Tully’s fan? Let me know what you think of the coffee roaster’s new cups.

“With American consumers using more than 16 billion paper hot cups every year, leaders in the specialty coffee retail industry need to take action,” Tully’s spokesman Rob Martin said in a press release.

Indeed, Rob.

Good job, Tully’s!

On a side note … If you’re already approved for recycling food waste in your yard waste bin, take note: Cedar Grove does not want residential customers to throw any plastic- or wax-lined paper products, even biodegradable or compostable dinnerware, into their yard waste bins for recycling. Pizza boxes are OK, but milk cartons are not, for example. Milk cartons, once thought to be compostable, should go in your recycle bin, not the yard waste bin. Check with your local garbage and recycling hauler for a full list of what is acceptable for composting and recycling.