Facility arrangements and the environmental performance of disposable and reusable cups

Study-1 purposely used multiple data-sets for important life-cycle-processes, leading to large and overlapping spread in impact results. This prevents identifying a preferable disposable cup material, though still allows cautious preferences about waste treatment. Based on average impact results, composting biocups performs worse than other waste treatments, anaerobic digestion performs in almost all impact categories better than incineration for the PLA cup, and recycling performs slightly better than incinerating for both biocups (but not for the PS cup). The recycling-incineration comparison is affected by the relatively large credits for avoided Dutch electricity-production. Impact results for reusable cups in Study-2 do not perform better nor worse than disposable cups. Cleaning behavior strongly influences Impact results for the reusable cups.

Conclusions

Overall results do not allow preference for one of the disposable cups or for disposable versus reusable cups, but facility managers can stimulate using them more than once. This gives a considerable environmental gain.