Espresso Royale Caffe, the friendly neighborhood coffee shop facing campus on East Grand River Avenue, just announced it will start carrying environmentally friendly plastic cups made from a biodegradable, corn-based biopolymer.
This means the cups will break down like any other plant, and you can even compost them yourself.
The café also will start providing paper cups made from recycled paper. So even if people do toss Espresso Royale cups in the trash, both the paper and plastic will completely decompose in landfills.
This is a great step for the café to take. Standard disposable cups made from plastic are very difficult to recycle, and most people just trash them anyway.
But in a state where trash and landfill issues keep recycling themselves year after year, it's high time for us to start reducing the amount of trash we produce domestically instead of just fighting imported waste.
Espresso Royale has made a positive step toward solving the trash problem, and other companies in Michigan can benefit themselves and the environment by following suit.
Espresso Royale pays more for the recyclable cups, but the company's dedication to good environmental stewardship is more important than the extra money spent. Keeping the planet clean outweighs squeezing dimes and pennies from every customer for profit.
It's time for other companies to begin offering the same products and options to create a state and country of ecological stewardship. It's time for America to start improving its track record with better environmental choices.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Michigan was a national leader in recycling and solid waste management. In 1976, a strong majority of state voters passed the most progressive bottle bill in the nation, and in 1988, voters approved a bond to kick-start major recycling programs, according to the Ecology Center, or EC, of Ann Arbor.
As a state, we've clearly moved too far in the opposite direction in the last 20 years. During the 1990s, under the John Engler administration, the state began providing tax-free financing for new landfill facilities and lowered a landfill owner's liability for environmental contamination, according to EC. During this time, Michigan also did away with funding for any new recycling initiatives.
New landfills popped up all over the state as a result, and landfill owners couldn't fill them fast enough to maintain a steady profit. Basic supply and demand for trash created a price war for dumping fees - the fees everyone pays per ton to dump trash.
Today, Michigan has one of the lowest dumping fees and is the third largest importer of trash in the country.
Legislators have been trying to implement bans on imported trash and campaigns like "Don't Trash Michigan" are creating some noise on the home front, but the real and permanent changes have to happen in our own households.
Some people are already setting great examples. A friend of mine found out someone at a local housing cooperative had just tossed all of the house's recyclables. My friend brought his truck to the house, dug the copious amount of recyclables out of the dumpster and took them to a recycling center.
Another friend practices indoor composting with a worm bin - he tosses his fruit and veggie scraps into a plastic bin, and worms in the bin digest the materials to create some highly nutritious soil.
We can all be a little more conscious about our waste patterns without going to extremes. Avoiding disposable products is simple and effective - using permanent water bottles, travel coffee mugs and glass dishes keeps their disposable counterparts out of our landfills.
Recycling and composting also make a huge difference on the amount of trash each house produces, and recycling especially is facilitated by East Lansing's curbside pickup.
If we all work together to reduce our waste load just a little bit, the impact could result in a wake-up call for Michigan to start making better trash choices.
Liz Kersjes is the State News opinion writer. Reach her at kersjese@msu.edu.
