Company devises genius way to eliminate the most annoying thing about drinking hot coffee: ‘It took about three years’

A good cup of coffee can be a powerful thing. Now, a product called The Good Cup is making a powerful difference when it comes to coffee-related waste.

The Good Cup, winner of a 2023 German Design Award, eliminates the need for plastic coffee lids forevermore. It’s a recyclable, compostable cup that folds at the top to allow easy pouring, sipping, and reopening, and it has the potential to change the way we drink coffee.

Choose Planet A, the company behind The Good Cup, was founded with sustainability in mind.

“It is our belief that by providing the market with sustainable alternatives to plastic, we can encourage a better end-of-use cycle for packaging across the industry,” the company explains on its website. “Choose Planet A provides non-plastic, biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable solutions in paper stream for the entire packaging chain of supply in order to promote, support, and inspire top-down solutions for the world’s consumers.”

Cyril Drouet, who designed the cup, told Fast Company that it took “about three years” and “about 1,000 handmade samples” to perfect the folding design of The Good Cup, which will make its North American debut (in Canada) in 2023. From there, the company hopes to license the design around the world in order to cut down on costs and waste from transportation.

Eliminating plastic waste is one of the key environmental challenges of our time. In the words of the U.N. Environment Programme, “our planet is choking on plastic,” as humans produce over 440 million tons of plastic waste every year.

Plastic coffee lids are particularly bad for the environment. According to environmental nonprofit FoodPrint, single-use plastic coffee lids are often made from polypropylene or polystyrene No. 6, “a petroleum-based plastic that is difficult to recycle.”

The Good Cup’s website includes a Plastic Saving Calculator that shows the amount of plastic that can be saved by using anywhere from one million to 10 billion Good Cups. If the world were to use 10 billion Good Cups instead of regular coffee cups with plastic lids and plastic-coated paper, the calculator shows a plastic savings of over 47,000 tons.

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