{"id":15449,"date":"2018-02-21T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=15449"},"modified":"2018-02-26T09:35:18","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T17:35:18","slug":"symposium-shines-light-on-colleges-coffee-cup-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2018\/02\/21\/symposium-shines-light-on-colleges-coffee-cup-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Symposium shines light on college\u2019s coffee-cup problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, January 23, The Curse of the Coffee Cup, a symposium about the environmental impacts of disposable coffee cups, was simulcast at Camosun College\u2019s two campuses. The event focused on how we can reduce or eliminate the use of paper and plastic coffee cups at Camosun.<\/p>\n

\u201cCamosun has for the past five or six years undertaken a waste audit. Previously, it was through an outside company, but for the past few years they\u2019ve been doing it internally,\u201d says Camosun Economics professor Becky Mason, who organized the symposium. \u201cFor 24 hours at each campus, they weigh, photograph, and categorize the garbage that we generate; historically, the big issue has been that roughly 90 percent of garbage that we generate should be recyclable, but we\u2019re only hitting 30 to 40 percent. There\u2019s this huge gap that I\u2019ve always wanted to address; disposable coffee cups are just one of the many kinds of recyclable items, but it\u2019s one that, I think, is easy to target, and that\u2019s another reason why I brought together all of this event.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Camosun Economics, Statistics, and University Transfer Business chair Bijan Ahmadi (left) at Camosun\u2019s The Curse of the Coffee Cup symposium (photo by Camosun College A\/V Services).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To Mason, the event also helps showcase some of the problems that society has in accepting and adapting to these environmentally positive changes. She says that, to many people, one coffee cup can seem to have very little impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue is that we\u2019re asking people to make behavioural changes. I think especially with coffee cups, one cup can seem so inconsequential, but when you add them all together and look at the bigger picture, it becomes a societal issue,\u201d says Mason. \u201cIt\u2019s the problem of asking people to make individual changes that some perceive is a cost to them, that the disposable cups are of value to them, and so they don\u2019t want to see them go away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aramark food service director Donna Burger says that she feels the event wasn\u2019t enough (Aramark runs Camosun\u2019s Lansdowne cafeteria and Interurban\u2019s Urban Diner, as well as the By the Books and Java Express coffee shops). She says that the turnout wasn\u2019t as high as she wanted it to be or as it needed to be to effectively communicate the issues and to make a dent in solving the problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it was a good start but it definitely wasn\u2019t enough. The low number of people that attended just tells me that people think it\u2019s not the most important thing. We all can be guilty of saying it\u2019s important to us but never taking action, and that bothers me,\u201d says Burger. \u201cI would love to see Camosun hold something consistently about Aramark\u2019s products and our commitment to sustainability in the on-boarding and orientation period of both students and faculty. If we want to walk the talk, I think that\u2019s where we start.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burger says that she hopes larger companies start to take action on this issue, too. She says that Aramark does a good job at being sustainable where it can be, but she says that other companies will have to look at their shifting customer demographic and give environmentally sustainable products that more and more customers want.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope that larger coffee companies will start to look at these 18-to-24-year-old demographics. This is important to them, and if they want them to be part of their customer base\u2014and, let\u2019s face it, that\u2019s a very big part of their customer base\u2014then they\u2019re going to need to look at the trends,\u201d says Burger. \u201cI\u2019m very passionate with this. I truly believe that we all need to start doing our part to make a change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, January 23, The Curse of the Coffee Cup, a symposium about the environmental impacts of disposable coffee cups, was simulcast at Camosun College\u2019s two campuses. The event focused on how we can reduce or eliminate the use of paper and plastic coffee cups at Camosun. \u201cCamosun has for the past five or six […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-february-21-2018"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15449"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15452,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15449\/revisions\/15452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}