The Mug Users Guild (M.U.G.) and The Disposable Coffee Cup
We’ve been following the brilliant coffee blog Dear Coffee, I Love You for quite a while now. They’ve got the best coffee graphics going and they’re big fans of our current favourite coffee maker, the AeroPress.
Any AeroPress user will tell you they love how easy it is to use and that it’s no trouble carrying it from town to town, hotel to hotel, campsite to campsite. Taking the coffee itself between places does pose a different type of problem. Outdoors-y types are probably happy enough with a Thermos or similar flask, but for those of us who want to take a good coffee in the car and have a few sips on the way there isn’t really an adequate solution. There are a huge number of poor quality portable cups that don’t keep the coffee hot, or seem to take something away from the taste. Whilst this might seem okay (because it’s generally expected that the drink won’t be as enjoyable in the car on the way to work as it would be at home with a good book) – it’s not. Why settle for a poor experience, an okay-but-not-great cup of coffee that could actually be more of what you want it to be?
This principle also applies to disposable cups. Paper or styrofoam cups are the most commonplace coffee cups, and without doing any research other than looking out of the window(!), they arguably have the most visible coffee cup presence in society today. They’re everywhere. The clue to how good they are is in the name. They’re disposable, not meant for re-use. That’s where the Mug Users Guild (M.U.G.) and the Damn Thy Disposable campaign comes in.
From the website:
MUG advocates the glorified wielding of reusable beverage receptacles, shunning the feckless use of disposable cups (i.e. reusable mug = good; disposable cup = bad). MUG encourages coffee establishments globally to adopt a responsible code of conduct to discontinue the mass distribution of wasteful to-go cups; offering reusable mugs as the only option to thirsty patrons.
and a shorter version:
Do not fret. Just use a mug.
Retailing quality espresso cups ourselves, we’re fully behind M.U.G. and everything in their manifesto.
Read more about the Mug Users Guild here.
Tags: aeropress, coffee cups, damn thy disposable, mug, mug users guild, reusable, sustainability
