Coffee Cup - Coffee Cup Information and Trivia
After the turn of the century, everyone is doing their part to go “green” and preserve our important environment. We know that certain products, tires, diapers, paper products take years upon years to disintegrate and are piling up in landfills across America. Many new innovations have come into the picture including the ecofriendly disposable coffee cup.
This coffee cup appropriately named the "ecotainer" garnered the 2007 Sustainability award given by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). The ecotainer was developed by several major corporations and debuted last year during the partnership of International Paper and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
So, you may ask what makes the ecotainer such a special disposable coffee cup. It is being widely promoted as having a smaller environmental impact than Styrofoam coffee cups. Traditional cups often have a plastic lining allowing them to handle hot beverages. The econtainer cups have what's known as an inner plastic biopolymer lining which strange as it may seem is made from corn. International paper tells us that they are made from fully recyclable products and can be made into compost under the proper conditions.
The technology invented in the ecotainer was developed by International Paper's Coated Paperboard and Foodservice businesses together with DaniMer Scientific, LLC (DaniMer Scientific, LLC, a privately held Georgia-based company). A corn-based poly lactic acid resin from Nature Works LLC (a stand-alone company solely owned and operated by Cargill) is modified by DaniMer Scientific to create a new material that can be applied to paperboard to create a water-resistant barrier. This new corn based material replaces the petrochemical plastic lining mentioned earlier.
Since there are 15 billion disposable coffee cups used annually in the United States, the ecotainer would have to have wide spread use. International paper proudly states that we can all make a difference one disposable cup at a time.
This is one of the many product innovations geared toward saving and preserving our good earth. Hopefully this is just the beginning and there are many more products just waiting to be developed and produced down the road.