Earth Day: Reduce for 100 days to make it worth it!

I started riding bikes to reduce my carbon footprint and to stay healthy.  Since then, I ride for more than that one reason, but I still think this is an important part of cycling.  This is why I love riding to work.  This post is in honor of Earth Day, and even though it is slightly cynical, I still believe that the message is good and that we should all try to reduce, reuse, and recycle, especially if we don’t have to go out of our way to do so.

Today Starbucks is giving away free drip coffee for anyone who brings in a travel mug in honor of Earth Day. Pretty neat!  Really I think this is a ploy to get you to buy a coffee mug from Starbucks, and here’s why.

A Starbucks tumbler like mine above costs  $11.95.  Starbucks drip coffee will normally costs $1.95, but if I use a regular mug, they knock 10 cents off for being a good steward of the world and reducing waste.  Today the coffee is on Starbucks!  So let’s say I woke up this morning, drearily stumbled into Starbucks for my morning coffee and decided to buy a travel mug to get free coffee!  And then let’s say I started going to Starbucks every day and using the mug.  It would take me 100 days to recuperate the cost of the mug.  If you drink two cups a day, that’s 50 days before you’re in the black.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to keep a mug for more than 3 months (90 days), which is the equivalent of buying 4 mugs a year. So I never get to even and in the end, and Starbucks still wins, getting even more of my money and having a great marketing campaign spread through the masses with social media.  They come off as a great environmentally friendly company when this might not really be the case.  But in my mind, here’s the good part:  the Earth wins too.  Starbucks brilliantly got me to buy the mug and use it, reducing waste and the carbon emissions to manufacturer 100 paper cups.  And if I can manage to keep a mug for more than 100 days, my pocketbook wins as well.

So if you also answer to the call of the Green Siren, go ride your bike to buy a mug and take a 100 day pledge to use it when you buy coffee!