Kathy Sheridan: We’re arguing over coffee cups while the world burns

Some day, a historian will chance upon a couple of headlines from Monday’s paper – “Storm brewing over plan to tax coffee cups”; “Europe braces for record heat this week” – and wonder if, back in the summer of 2023, some humans really believed they inhabited a different planet.

Just as the newly-formed Irish Paper Packaging Circularity Alliance (IPPCA) was launching a report suggesting that a 20 cent levy on customers for single-use coffee cups could result in huge job losses, Greek authorities were forced to close the Acropolis for the first time due to unprecedented heat. This happened in a country where tourism accounts for a staggering 25 per cent of GDP.

This week, we watched beloved holiday destinations and countless tourism-dependent livelihoods around southern Europe buckling in the furnace of climate warming. In Sicily and Sardinia, temperatures were surging to the highest recorded in Europe. Rome’s forecast threatened to smash the record set last summer. Wildfires raged on the Spanish island of La Palma.

Humans have altered the chemistry of the oceans – which absorb most of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions – driving unprecedented changes in global marine ecosystems, sea levels, and rainfall patterns, bringing death and destruction to the US, South Korea, India and Japan in the past week.

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Will slapping a 20 cent tax on a single-use coffee cup help to slow the gallop towards our own extinction? Of course it won’t. But one thing is certain: the time for climate whataboutery is gone.

Those omnipresent lifestyle accessories rank among the most obviously wasteful, egregiously self-indulgent symbols of our hubris. That applies whether they end up in a recycling bin, or a compost heap, or in landfill. Bioplastics, where the polyethylene lining is compostable plastic, are an undoubted advance, but still require enormous resources of land and water. And unless they go in the brown bin, they might as well be regular plastics. Bioplastics have a purpose, but not in a patently unnecessary coffee cup.

Our worst excesses are driven by the need for convenience, and if companies spring up to exploit that, well, that’s on us. And most of us have succumbed, as the IPPCA’s report makes clear.

Our worst excesses are driven by the need for convenience, and if companies spring up to exploit that, well, that’s on us

The takeaway coffee market accounts for around 222,000,000 cups of coffee a year, according to the alliance’s own research, although the Environmental Protection Agency waste characterisation study puts it at around 730 million coffee cups.

Anyway the IPPCA suggests that despite attempts to change our habits, a paltry 1.71 per cent of sales are in reusable cups. Yet we know that EPA public surveys between 2019 and 2021 demonstrated enormous support for a ban on single-use plastic products or a levy at the point of purchase.

So are we all about action, right up to where our convenience is threatened? The IPPCA certainly thinks so. A few quotes from its report:

“The reality is that consumers are resistant to behavioural change.”

“The reality is that consumers of takeaway coffee often do not plan the purchase ... Being forced to pay more for coffee due to a levy or being forced to use reusable cups would damage this spontaneous purchasing of coffee. It would reduce convenience, undermine speed of service, and would damage affordability.”

“A levy or penalty implies that people are doing something they should not be doing, and this will further discourage consumption.”

It also argues that an important element of youth culture is being threatened, saying young people haven’t many other alternatives to coffee shops, apart from pubs. “The coffee shop culture should be promoted, rather than discouraged through disproportionate policy decisions.” It doesn’t explain why anyone sitting in a coffee shop has to drink from single-use cups.

As for the coffee vendors themselves, the IPPCA foresees a loss of around 4,244 jobs and a reduction of 8.23 per cent on average in coffee sales if the 20 cent levy is introduced. A total ban on such cups, it says, would cause a near 50 per cent sales wipeout and the loss of around 25,063 jobs in the sector.

But an en masse turn to reusable cups would also have disastrous consequences for a sector dominated by small microenterprises, it suggests. “For smaller premises, retrofitting to install dishwashing facilities [for reusable cups] will prove very difficult, if not impossible.”

The increased costs involved, it estimates, would reach nearly half a billion euro for the whole sector. Basically, the report accuses politicians of singling out the sector “for special treatment ... The proposed measures seem disproportionate.” Thus the not-so-coded threat of massive cheap plastic imports, “the distinct risk that in the face of levies and regulations, vendors of coffee will choose to use the cheapest possible reusable cups made from cheap plastic, which are imported, and which have a short lifespan.” A similar argument was used five years ago by the British Paper Cup Alliance, when the UK government was considering a latté levy. The levy failed to feature in the Chancellor’s 2018 budget.

How much convincing do we need? We’ve managed to radically change our behaviour before, with the plastic bag levy and the smoking ban. Can the climate disasters on our doorstep really have no bearing on our convenience? If we can carry chunky laptops, phones, lunchboxes and babies on buses and bicycles, what’s the problem with a little keep-cup?