The Tale of Two Cups: An Appropriate Technology Joint

I'm a packrat, but the useless junk I hoard mostly isn't actual garbage, it's just stuff that isn't useful (but will be someday. I know it!)

But when I went to India a few months ago, I came back with not one, but TWO disposable cups stashed in my bag, which I had saved after drinking coffee/tea from them. I saved them because they serve the same nominal purpose, yet represent wildly different circumstances and versions of disposability.

Wikipedia defines appropriate technology as being "designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political and economic aspects of the community it is intended for." So how appropriate are these two disposable cups for the communities they're distributed in?

Here they are.

On the left is a heavily textured paper cup from Costa Coffee, from a kiosk in Delhi's cushy airport. The textured zig-zags on the cup are thick enough to protect your hands from the coffee's heat, so you don't have to use the little cardboard rings many coffee shops offer. The thing is a joy to hold. It's like a teddy bear...kinda. Fun to touch, is my point. The heat protection feature serves the second purpose of making the Costa cup a more pleasant tactile experience than most disposable cups.  It's also a huge waste of non-recyclable paper, as most disposable paper cups are, but this one was neat enough that I  now keep it on my desk, full of pens, after having...uh..rinsed it out first, of course....

On the right is a red clay cup I saved (then broke accidentally) from a tea shop in Kolkata. The city's streetside tea stalls and small shops typically have big plastic tubs full of hundreds of these cups. It holds about an ounce of tea, and when you're done drinking it, you chuck the cup in the street, where it shatters and contributes to a large pile of rapidly disintegrating red clay shards from other people's morning teacups. I say "clay" and not "ceramic," because although these cups have clearly been dried somehow, they haven't been glazed at all, and they don't appear to have been fired to maximum hardness. Fuel to heat a kiln full of these cups could get expensive, and they use a lot of them. If 0.1% of Kolkata's population used one of these cups per day, the city would use ~5.4 million per year.  Looking closely at the cup, it is clear that it was thrown on a potter's wheel, and most of these cups that I used were remarkably consistent in size, shape and wall and base thickness. Anyone who has tried throwing pots on a wheel knows that making anything is tough, and making multiple, consistently sized tiny cups would take a lot of practice. BBC's Judy Swallow claims to have seen a potter churning out these cups at a rate of one every eight-seconds, making thousands per day. Plus, her last name is Swallow, and we're talking about tiny cups here, so...

Some people pay serious cash for good pottery, and it seems like these cup throwers could make other awesome things too. Maybe they do, and I just don't know. The cost of attractively glazing and firing pro pottery is probably a huge deterrent.


Appropriate technology is all about winners and losers, so which one of these cups wins?

Given the easy recyclability of unfired clay shards, and the minimal (I think) number of steps between digging clay out of the ground and making pottery out of it, compared to wood being pulped and made into paper cups, the clay cups win on the environmental front. Also, paper cups typically aren't all paper. That waxy coating on the inside is actually plastic. Not easy to recycle or biodegradable.

Another reason the clay cups are better is that a bunch of individual skilled laborers can earn money manufacturing the cups. More countries should use products that are human-labor intensive rather than machine-labor intensive. Undoubtedly, Costa's hand-massager/paper cup is made by machine. And the number of people paid to maintain that machine and feed materials into it is likely fewer than the number of people making a living throwing Kolkata's millions of clay teacups. It seems that the clay cups are appropriate tech for a market where people need jobs. And also for a planet where resources are finite, and need to be recycled.

What to do...what to do...

One-time-use clay cups won't catch on in the U.S. for countless reasons. But reusable ceramic mugs are ubiquitously available, and are better than paper or throwaway clay cups in every way possible. Plus, it is easier to propose a toast and clink cups with a mug than a paper cup. So take your own mug down to whatever hip coffee den you call home, or use the washable cups they have there for you.
It's easy Mmkay?

FAQ:  "What's with the word "joint" in the title of this post...isn't that some kind of drug thing?" 
--Well, perhaps, but actually that's a reference to the immortal Spike Lee, who labels many of his films "A Spike Lee Joint."