Every morning, students rush to Starbucks in Wold to get some coffee before their first class. The line is always enormous, stretching all the way down the hall. Sometimes, students purchase multiple cups of coffee a day to get their daily dosage of caffeine. The amount of paper and plastic cups that Starbucks uses on our campus a day creates a tremendous amount of excess waste.
Therefore, to combat this impractical waste issue, I would use the Green Grant to create reusable cups for Starbucks. There will be cups for hot and cold beverages. With the purchase of a cup (approximately 5-10 dollars), the amount of plastic and paper waste per day would be drastically decreased. To incentivize this, students who use their reusable coffee cups should receive some type of discount on their coffee. I think this idea is a quick, and cheap way to limit waste on campus.
You propose that students get a discount with their new reusable mug, which I found to really solidify your argument. You not only found a solution to the problem of excess waste but also incentivized your solution with a discount. I would not be opposed to this idea.
I think giving students a discount if they used a reusable cup is a great incentive. I personally have seen some people at Wold reuse their plastic cups from earlier in the day, which is a good start, but by creating ones for purchase that can withstand being reused would be a good idea.
I think that this is a great idea–I think that if Union looked into how much waste we’re actually producing from using non-reusable cups, we would be surprised to see how great of a quantity this is. I think that incentivizing students by discounting drinks is also a great idea to get more people on board.