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(Almost) Good Design: This Café's Spent Cup Stacking System to Minimize Trash/Recycling Volume

By Rain Noe - January 2, 2020

in Organization

When I was living in Japan, I worked at an elementary school. After having lunch, each and every one of the students would take their empty milk cartons and meticulously flatten them. These flattened cartons then all went into the same transparent plastic bag, and I was surprised to see how many it held. A teacher explained to me that this system was utilized because it meant using fewer trash bags, and making less trips to the dumpster. If this system were spread across every school in Japan, the savings would be significant.

Go to any coffee shop in America, and as you look down the silver-lined waste tube thingy, you'll see paper and plastic cups in an ungainly pile, taking up way more space than they ought. However, this café in Korea has a better idea:

Image credit: laxanh

I say it's almost good design, because while it does mitigate the problem, it looks a bit ungainly and unintegrated with the rest of their waste collection system. I also think it can't be easy for the workers to fish the stacks out. But I do think this is a step in the right direction.

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Chris Horning

4 years ago

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I can share that this idea went through an HCD design process
at a large cup supplier, was then trialed in the US, and proved to be successful
to educate consumers and create action to recycle EPS cups in store, and all
design rights plus supporting data given with no strings attached (because it
would keep EPS cup sales) to a global manufacturer of collection systems.
A company that could competitively create consumer products from the
recycled EPS existed (exists). Corporations that owned businesses which
would use this system did not feel that implementation would generate more
profit or was a benefit to brand stories because of the cost to change consumer
perception.

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Bradley Johnson

4 years ago

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I think this is a great low tech solution. It would take quite a bit of effort to educate the public, but well worth it.

I haven't seen anything like this in the US, but most of the retail jobs i worked were at malls where they have dumpsters out back with built in compactors. I've seen scaled down (slightly bigger than a normal trash can) compactors at airports for people's recyclables, but nowhere else. I imagine the cost (plus energy usage) is prohibitive.

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