It's Only $50K

Tempest in coffee cup consumes City Hall
KEITH BEATY/TORONTO STAR
Toronto generates about 350 million paper coffee cups as waste every year. A task force set up to decide what to do with them won't report until June 2009.

Figuring out how to cut back on paper cups has taken 6 months, a 40-member task force, 5 subcommittees and $50,000 for consultants

It takes just a minute to grab a cup of takeout coffee.
But to figure out what to do with the empty cup? That will take six months of deliberation by a 40-member task force, split into five subcommittees and backed up by $50,000 worth of consultants' reports.
A task force set up by the City of Toronto in December on what to do about the 350 million takeout cups dispensed here each year won't meet its April deadline.
It will be June before the task force reports. And even then, the outlook for a consensus ranges from gloomy to cautiously optimistic.
"Is it more complicated than we anticipated? Yes," acknowledges Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, chair of the city's works committee, which ignited the issue last fall with a report on getting packaging materials out of the garbage stream.
The hottest issue proved to be coffee cups.
City staff said customers who bring their own cups should get a 20-cent discount on tea or coffee drinks. They also said paper cups with plastic lids should be banned, because paper recyclers complain the lids contaminate the paper.
The recommendations didn't fly.
Toronto council gave in to a furious lobbying effort by the takeout industry. Instead of making a decision, council set up a city-industry task force and gave it an April deadline.
Now the decision has been pushed back until June because consultants hired by the task force – largely at city expense – are just completing their reports on topics ranging from consumer behaviour, to markets for recycled material, to health and safety issues involved in allowing customers to use their own cups.
"There's no way it can all be completed and assessed by April," says Kim McKinnon of the Canadian Grocery Distributors Council, a task force participant.
Leslie Smejkal, manager of government affairs for Tim Hortons, says health issues need more study.
Coffee shops worry about customers bringing in dirty cups: If germy cups rub up against coffee dispensers, they could spread disease. And if customers get sick drinking from badly cleaned cups, the coffee shop could get the blame.
On the plus side, Smejkal said she's encouraged there's a separate subcommittee calculating the economic impact of the city's proposals on businesses.
"We remain hopeful," she said in an interview. "We're working together. We'll see what comes of it. It's too early in the process to see what direction they're going."
Stephanie Jones, Ontario vice-president of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, takes a darker view.
"I haven't seen any progress so far" beyond setting up a subcommittee, Jones said. "We are working very diligently in any way the city is asking us to, to show them that the recommendations they made in November are unreasonable and a burden on small business," she said.
"They're not sending the signals to business that they're intending to commit to a composting or recycling solution, and that's really what we really need them to be doing."
Geoff Rathbone, Toronto's general manager of solid waste, says getting coffee cups into the recycling stream is, in fact, what he's trying to do, but the issue of plastic lids and paper cups remains to be solved.
He's not as keen on composting, however. It's more expensive and the city bears the full cost, whereas industries are required to share the cost of recycling. Plus, recycling bins are common all over the city, while green bins are scarce.
Buried in the fuss about recycling issues has been the question of the 20-cent refund for customers with travel mugs. That will be discussed in coming weeks, Rathbone said.
Will there be agreement?
"There's certainly not a consensus yet, but part of getting a consensus is by talking to each other," says De Baeremaeker, who stays optimistic.
Rathbone says the process won't grind on forever, because he has been directed to come up with recommendations for councillors by June.
"We'll come back with a recommendation," Rathbone said. "Whether we reach consensus or not with the stakeholder group is another matter. Ultimately, it's our job to listen and to weigh all the various opinions and write our recommendations."
De Baeremaeker says that while the process appears long and costly, it's worthwhile to find the right solution.
"When you look at 350 million coffee cups a year, every year for the next decade, it will cost millions upon millions of dollars to come up with a solution," he said.
"So, investing $50,000 up front to come up with the most financially and ecologically sound option is money well spent."