Paper Cups

 

Paper Cups

One of the most famous writers in America was Samuel Clemens using the pen name Mark Twain. Clemens took on that pen name after his years as a pilot on the Mississippi River where the word twain denoted water that was two fathoms (or twelve feet) deep. Before his success in penning fictional stories including his most famous, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyers,” Clemens honed his writing career as first, an employee in a print shop followed by work as a newspaper reporter, responsible for regular columns in the Territorial Enterprise Newspaper, from Virginia City, Nevada.

After he had achieved phenomenal success as a writer of fiction, Twain wrote about his experience as a newspaper reporter. He explained that his first columns were easy and fast to write. He said that he decided on topics to write about after wandering around town and talking to local folks who had no more pressing things to do than talk with a young reporter who seemed to have a flare for making everyday things seem interesting.

Clemens went on to say that his reporting for the newspaper became more and more difficult after a few months on the job as his ideas on topics to write about became more and more scarce. As he neared the mark of preparing 100 newspaper columns, he found himself struggling to find new topics to write about by about wandering around the town. By this time, he had changed his approach to writing for the newspaper. Instead of reporting on “news” from the tiny town of Virginia City, Clemens fell into the habit of simply making things up for his columns. Apparently, his editor at the newspaper was not amused as Clemens soon left the newspaper for other endeavors.

No doubt that most bloggers have the same problem as Clemens in finding new topics to discuss. It should be no surprise to you that I am one of those. Now that I have written over 150 blogs over the past ten years, it may be apparent that I often have to search for new material. Some may argue that I have followed Clemens in offering blogs that aren’t scrupulously true. Judge for yourself if “Paper Cups” is an example of material that we all need to know to improve our air quality at low cost.

Recycling

You may know that I am a dedicated recycler, frustrated by our society’s inability to stop, or at least decrease, the number of things that we send to landfills. Surely, our advanced society can find some use for unwanted things instead of hiding them in the soil. Paper cups are a fine example of our wasteful and illogical habits in using what could otherwise be a source of reconstituted material for a variety of uses. Modern technology should help us deliver low cost and convenient containers for dispensing drinks without fouling our lands with used, unwanted cups. Consider how helpful it would be to use paper cups without the need for cleaning and sanitizing permanent containers like glass or porcelain cups typically found in home kitchens.

My first memory of disposable paper cups is associated with a large water jug in our local dime store where customers were offered free drinking water (see image above) The free drinks came from a large glass bottle turned upside down with a nozzle at the bottom and an adjacent stack of conical paper cups offered for free. Each small cup held just 6 ounces of water. These small containers fit nicely into one hand and could be used only one time as they began to disintegrate after a few minutes of use. You could sense the beginning of their end as the paper rapidly began to disintegrate, the containers ready for disposal.

Now we have a different type of paper cup that is available from any number of fast-food places or the grocery store. Americans seem to have fallen in love with these paper cups. North Carolina State University says that in 2020 we used 136-milllion paper cups every day. Our modern paper cups are not recyclable like other paper products. If a paper cup does find its way to a recycling center, in most instances the recycler must separate it from other papers and send it to the landfill. There it will rest for months or years before the resident bacteria slowly digest the cups and emit a gaseous methane that may escape and foul the atmosphere.

If a paper cup happens to be sent to a compost pile the deterioration occurs faster, but is still too slow for most who want to make a profit from the process. The reason for the slow rate of composting today’s cups is that they are made more durable by coatings applied to the paper before or after the paper is folded into shape.

The earliest durable paper cups that I recall used heat resistant wax coatings to increase the durability of the cup. The early wax coatings have now been supplanted by coatings that are essentially plastic, predominantly thin polyethylene films. These cups are not readily recyclable even though they are largely made of paper, a material that is recyclable by reconstituting the paper in a modern paper mill. Today’s paper cups can be recycled at the penalty of much longer digestion times in most paper mill’s digestion processes.

Accordingly, recycling companies are faced with limited opportunities when dealing with high volume quantities of paper cups. They can send the cups to the landfill or find a paper processor who can change his normal process to one that can remove the plastic coating on the cups, or send the cups to a business who can burn the cups to make energy. This latter opportunity can only work if the paper cups arrive at the business in a form that can be fed into their furnaces and the resultant smoke is treated to reduce air pollution.

Research is underway on more efficient processing of the mountain of paper cups that we use every day. The hope is that new technology can be developed to process paper cups to remove the applied films. At least one processor believes he can achieve this goal without undue added costs. Hurray for his work that may finally make the cups live up to their full potential as a low-cost container that can be reused. Stay tuned.