BY: Rachel Bauman
Over 50% of Americans over 18 years of age drink coffee every day. Americans throw away about 25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups every year, and 2.5 million plastic beverage bottles every hour. (EAA)
How to act against this evil cause? Easy... stop drinking coffee!
Over 50% of Americans over 18 years of age drink coffee every day. Americans throw away about 25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups every year, and 2.5 million plastic beverage bottles every hour. (EAA)
So what does this mean? American's drink a lot of coffee!
NO, the real and biggest problem with these cups in that a good majority of them are made from styrofoam or they are lined with it to make it more liquid proof. I said this in my last post about plastic bags, styrofoam never completely degrades making them last forever and be very harmful for our environment. THese cups make up 18% of Americas garbage (EAA). At that rate if you bought just one cup of coffee in a disposable cup every day, you create around 23 lbs of waste in one year (EAA)! Not good!
The part of the styrofoam cup that lines it to make it more waterproof, is called polyethylene. This is what keeps the cups from being able to be recycled. It's the part of the cup that never breaks down and can last up to 500 years in a landfill! Then we also have paper cups. They are obviously bad for the environment because thousand or millions of poor innocent trees loose their lives to make the paper product!
The part of the styrofoam cup that lines it to make it more waterproof, is called polyethylene. This is what keeps the cups from being able to be recycled. It's the part of the cup that never breaks down and can last up to 500 years in a landfill! Then we also have paper cups. They are obviously bad for the environment because thousand or millions of poor innocent trees loose their lives to make the paper product!
Harmful health effects you ask? YES of course! Plastic and styrofoam are hard to make and let our a lot of CO2 emissions, "each paper cup manufacture creates 0.24 lbs of CO2 emissions and is let go in our air" (EAA). Breathing this is you can bet is not healthy for anyone. Polystyrene has also been labeled by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as "a probable carcinogen". So when hot food or liquid is in a styrofoam cup it may melt and you would be congesting this harmful carcinogen that will eventually harm out health.
How to act against this evil cause? Easy... stop drinking coffee!
Like that will ever happen. A more realistic solution is so bring your own reusable cup from home whether is be glass or plastic. Even a reusable plastic is better because you are getting multiple uses out of it. SO... go buy a cup and bring it in! You usually get a discount as well, so two birds one stone... less expensive on your wallet and a lot better on the environment! I know giving up coffee will never be the answer so please be smart when purchasing your morning cup of jo! Styrofoam is bad... but we all know coffee is so good!
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