This morning I drove into town and stopped in at a café for a coffee only to be confronted by a green zealot when I asked for my coffee in a takeaway cup.
Because I chose to have it in a ‘use once’ small paper cup and was going to sit outside on a seat (not actually taking it away), the girl was going to charge me 50 cents extra. When I asked why, she announced that I was being penalised for not considering the Earth and that it was because of my indiscriminate use of a paper cup that her grandchildren may not have a planet to live on.
I decided to not let this pass and pointed a couple of things out, firstly telling her that such a stance was bullshit and that if she thought about it she would see that pine forests were grown commercially especially for the production of paper cups and other consumer goods.
“Do you use toilet paper” I said?
“I try to use as little as possible” she said.
It suddenly occurred to me that this person was not thinking for herself. She was running a program, probably instilled into her at school and now that she was out in the real world, her mission was to operate as an evangelist for the agenda driven powers that be, including the café owner who obviously saw an opportunity to make a little extra.
“The vast pine forests just down the road are not grown for oxygen, or even to save the planet” I said.
“They are grown so that I can enjoy my coffee in a cup with a lid on it, which will keep it hot. And so that we can all use paper towels and two-ply toilet paper without feeling guilty about milling the native trees.”
The girl looked blankly at me. There was an awkward silence then the price for my coffee came up on the eftpos machine and I noticed that the extra 50 cents had not been charged.
“A victory for sanity” I thought and looked around for somewhere to sit.
It’s actually very difficult to come out with a rational argument in the heat of the moment, and even more difficult to deal with emotive responses, but on this occasion I think the interaction went quite well.
Addendum:
There are approximately half a million paper cups in each average sized, mature, pine tree.
There are also different types of paper cups, some lined with a thin film of plastic, others with a thin layer of wax, to prevent liquid from soaking through the paper.
Surprisingly, paper cups go back to Imperial China in the 2nd century AD.