Sabkush Headlines: Brewing a better coffee cup online

Sabkush Headlines: Brewing a better coffee cup onlineBrewing a better coffee cup online

As is the custom these days, when digital-media strategist Toby Daniels sets up meetings, he goes out for coffee. When he would meet with Graham Hill, the founder of TreeHugger.com, Hill would bring along one of his side projects--a ceramic coffee cup in the manner of an old, diner-style paper cup, which he sells at WeAreHappyToServeYou.com. "Every time I used to meet Graham, he used to bring me one of these ceramic coffee cups sort of as a way to suggest I shouldnt be drinking my coffee out of a paper cup," said Daniels, who moved to New York from his native United Kingdom a few years ago. "Im still struggling to switch. I have five reusable cups at home and I never bring them with me when I get coffee on the go." Finally, Hills passive-aggressive statement of sustainability turned into an idea. While attending an April 2009 conference hosted by edgy consulting firm PSFK, the two came to the conclusion that maybe there was a real problem if a seemingly forward-thinking city dweller like Daniels couldnt seem to curb his addiction to disposable coffee cups. And thus, the Betacup Challenge was born: $20,000 of prize money at stake in a contest of designers, builders, and thinkers striving to create a legitimate alternative to the 58 billion disposable coffee cups that are thrown away, unrecycled, around the world each year. And this summer, after one false start nearly derailed the competition earlier this year, there will be a champion: Entries will close June 1, commentary and rating end June 15, and after that, judges select a winning design that will be awarded $10,000. The remaining $10,000 will be distributed among five community favorites. Theyll all be honored in an awards ceremony of sorts. The Betacup Challenge is purposely open-ended: design a coffee cup that addresses the problem of disposable coffee cups, and upload the concept to the Web. As a result, some of the 200-plus submissions are disposable cups that use alternative materials, some are reusable cups with a built-in incentive for actually bringing them back day after day, and some are entire infrastructures of cups and specialized recycling systems. Take, for example, the inflatable plastic "air cup" that claims to use less than half the material that a traditional coffee cup does, is already insulated to eliminate the need for cardboard sleeves, and which could be disposed at "cause recycling" locations that would funnel their reconstruction into materials for humanitarian projects, like water jugs and plastic lumber. A handful of entries weave Starbucks loyalty programs into the design of the cup. One of the top-rated Betacup Challenge submissions is the "Mille Mug," a collapsible cup that an MIT designer has already physically built, and suggests that it could be accompanied with a loyalty program that registers how many times the cup has been reused--which, in turn, ties into how many cups have been saved.