Conserve with Each Cup: A Vision for a Sustainable Ocean
This article is a post that comes from Greening Forward’s legacy blog. It was originally written by Dahye Kim, a student at Furman University, in 2019. It was selected as a winning entry in the 2019 Greening Forward Green Media Contest.
As coffee became an essential part for an urban lifestyle, the habit of easily disposing materials became routine for us. Therefore, the motive for this piece was reducing coffee-related waste. Starbucks, one of the largest coffee companies in the world, produces six billion disposable cups each year. Most of the cups are used very temporarily and carelessly thrown away. In order to increase the awareness of disposable cups’ piling waste, this artwork demonstrates what the ocean can look like if we produced less waste by bringing our own cups to drink coffee. While these cups are in our hands for less than a day, it takes them 20 years to decompose; for the plastic lids, it takes more than 450 years to completely break down. Most of the waste that does not get recycled or used ends up in the ocean, where they are busy invading and harming marine life.
In order to increase the awareness of disposable cups’ piling waste, this artwork demonstrates what the ocean can look like if we produced less waste by bringing our own cups to drink coffee. The materials for this cup are a used Starbucks coffee cup and used Pepsi plastic bottle. Keeping the style of the coffee brand’s font and arrangement was critical so that people would know what “Bring your own cup and…we proudly conserve” is targeting. Typical Starbucks designations — Decaf, shots, syrup — were changed instead to highlight key qualities for a sustainable life. This also is an acrostic that makes the word “nature” when you read the first letters vertically. In order to increase visual aspect of the sea, the plastic bottle was cut and painted blue, which depicts deep blue sea surrounded by beautiful colors of corals reefs. With the reused plastic section, a candle was put into the cup to be used as a decorative lantern.
