The weight of a cup of coffee

by admin

I love coffee. While I am not the 6+ cups a day, super extra large, gallon cup kind of guy, I regularly have two cups of coffee daily. It is a must. This is not an option.

One day while walking down the street in New York city I got a cup of coffee from a street vendor who literally could not pump them out fast enough. Across the street I saw a Starbucks with a line out the door, and not too far away there was a Dunkin Donuts with the same story. It got me thinking; that is a lot of coffee.

Not only is that a lot of coffee but it got me thinking, that is a lot of cups. Wow, is that a lot of cups. Since this fact is likely near, if not completely, impossible to get an accurate read on let’s try and get a high level probability view of the situation.

According to Wikipedia ” The city’s 2007 estimated population exceeds 8.3 million people” (they quote “Accepted Challenges to Vintage 2007 Population Estimates“. United States Census Bureau, Population Division. http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/2000s/vintage_2007/07s_challenges.html. Retrieved on 2009-04-09. as their source).

I have lived here for a decade and I know practically everyone I know drinks coffee at least once a day, most several. According to High Beam Research (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-148279532.html) the average adult coffee consumption in 2007 rose from 53% to 56%. While I would tend to think this skews higher in an urban area such as Manhattan, we will go with their numbers, 56%.

Put the two together and we have approximately 4,648,000 people drinking at least ONE cup of coffee daily. I read dozens of coffee-aholics blogs for this article and the numbers were, even to a coffee kind of guy, somewhat astonishing describing daily consumption.

Another NCA study claimed that in 1998 (latest data I could find) approximately 47.2% of Americans drank 3 or more cups a day. While this is decade old data, let’s assume that of the 4,648,000 people drinking coffee in Manhattan today that 47.2%, or 2,193,856 people, will drink 3 cups today.

In terms of cups that comes to 4,648,000 drinking coffee daily + 2(2,193,856) drinking 3 cups or more a day = 9,035,712 cups of coffee sold. Geesh, that is a crazy amount of cups.

Moving on, my local deli’s large coffee cup, with a lid, weighs approximately .8oz according to my handy postage scale. If you multiply 9,035,712 cups of coffee sold by .8 you get a total of 7,228,569.6 ounces. For those of you who didn’t know this, one ounce is equal to 0.0625 pounds. That works out to roughly 451,785.6 pounds of trash created daily by New Yorkers ONLY, daily. That is every day. That is a lot of garbage for us to feed our addictions, relieve our hangovers, perk up, etc.

That got me thinking, what does one do with this information? Well, I started by writing this post. From here I am more than happy to switch to a re-useable cup or simply make and drink it at home. These are all easier options and far less destructive. But what else? Can I recycle these?

The answer is yes and no. I can recycle the cardboard cup, which we do almost daily. This is a step. The plastic lid though at my local deli and at least one other retailer was a plastic number 8. This means in my municipality there is no way of recycling this part. Bummer. While I have a host of commentary on municipalities not recycling all forms of plastic we will save that for another day.

Then there are places like Dunkin Donuts which should, in this writer’s humble opinion, be drug out to the town square and tarred and feathered. Having styrofoam cups in 2009 is grotesquely irresponsible and simply hard to believe. Needless to say I do not get coffee there. If I am forced to, they have a small coffee option that is cardboard and I opt for this. While smaller, I hate them a little less for at least giving me an option to not use styrofoam. I have also stopped buying coffee from delis and other restaurants who use styrofoam. I asked one owner why they use styrofoam and her reply was “this is the only way to keep coffee warm”. Really? You ever hear of a small coffee retailer named Starbucks? No styrofoam to be seen, and one on every block in Manhattan, and guess what? Their coffee stays plenty hot.

In the end this little information hunt has made me at the very least reconsider my daily habits. It made me realize that even something as small as my daily cup(s) of coffee can have a fairly significant impact on the world around me. Tomorrow, I bring a mug.

July 29th, 2009  |   8:48 am