Plastic is bad for the environment, but should you feel virtuous sipping your coffee out of a paper cup? Just because paper is biodegradable, it is not better for the environment. “The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability. Or, to put it another way... a four-planet lifestyle,” environmental activist George Monbiot writes in The Guardian.
Last month, some campaigners made a pitch for replacing plastic coffee cups with those made from corn starch, without considering “where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace.”
Monbiot says, “We cannot address our environmental crisis by swapping one overused resource for another... The right question is, ‘How should we live?’”
The real problem is an economic system that seeks endless growth. The belief that this system can give every person on Earth a yacht and a supercar, and a mansion on a golf course, is delusional. What we need now is not a better kind of consumerism, but an end to consumerism. “Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem.”
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