At Perch Coffee House near Oakland’s Lake Merritt, customers can either order their coffee to enjoy onsite or rent a jar to take it to-go. They can’t get it in a paper cup.
In September, the cafe got rid of all of its single-use cups in an effort to cut down on waste — a move that’s gaining traction around the Bay Area, especially as more cities introduce policies limiting single-use foodware. Other cafes are making a similar transition, while some places like North Beach’s Family and Dominique Crenn’s soon-to-open Boutique Crenn are debuting without any disposable cups at all.
“It probably doesn’t make sense financially, but there are some things you just have to do,” said Perch owner Kedar Korde.
On a bigger scale, Blue Bottle Coffee is coming to the same conclusion: CEO Bryan Meehan said he plans to add a zero-waste cafe to the company’s portfolio.
“If we’re going to reverse climate change we have a responsibility at Blue Bottle not just to our guests and employees but the rest of the industry to take a lead in this area, even at the cost of losing business,” Meehan said.
New Oakland nonprofit For Here Please, which works with cafes to transition to more sustainable business models, estimates a typical coffee shop uses 1,500-4,000 single-use cups every week.
While several cities in the region have banned plastic takeout containers and utensils, most haven’t tried to curb single-use compostable coffee cups. The key exception is Berkeley, where cafes and restaurants will charge customers 25 cents per disposable cup starting in January 2020. Palo Alto has similar plans for 2021, and San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced legislation earlier this year that would require businesses to charge 25 cents for disposable cups and containers.
Anticipating Berkeley’s upcoming fee, the city tapped Berkeley’s Ecology Center to launch a reusable cup pilot program in September. It’s a partnership with Colorado startup Vessel, where folks can rent a stainless steel cup from a participating cafe and then drop it off at any of the 11 other participating locations.
About 1,000 cups were used in the program’s first month, according to Ecology Center executive director Martin Bourque. Customers sign up for the program online and enter their credit card information to rent a cup; they are charged $15 only if they don’t return a cup.
“It’s kind of like a library,” Bourque said.
For the pilot, the Ecology Center focused on bringing businesses onboard that are on or near the UC Berkeley campus. In the future, Bourque said he’d like to bring Vessel to even more businesses near campus. Then, he’d look to expand to other Berkeley neighborhoods and include reusable food containers beyond cups.
The ultimate goal is to change behavior, an idea echoed by Vanessa Pope, co-founder of For Here Please. The Oakland nonprofit helps cafes transition to more sustainable business models. Pope’s first client was Perch — the owners were noticing their paper cups being left on the sidewalks or chucked into Lake Merritt and felt eager to make a switch.
“Even if it was going to lead to an expense in terms of water or labor, we could no longer justify that a transaction of $3 that lasted two minutes was worth having this cup in our lake,” Korde said.
Instead of paper cups, Perch now stocks glass jars. Customers can rent them for a 50-cent deposit, which they get back if they return the jar. Many have chosen to keep the jars, though, because Perch now also offers a 25-cent discount to those who bring their own reusable cup.
The change has been swift. While Perch used to see maybe four customers bring a reusable mug each day, the cafe saw 40 on the day after the transition.
Korde said he hasn’t had to hire more staff to deal with the jars — time previously spent restocking supplies is now being spent washing dishes. While water use is also a concern in California, Bourque said washing dishes requires far less water than producing disposable products.
Last week, Oakland cafe called Hawk & Pony made the same transition as Perch with the help of For Here Please. Owner Rebecca Carpenter said she had wanted to make a dramatic change for the past couple of years as she thought about how many cups, lids and straws she’d go through in a single day. First, she switched to compostables, but she decided it wasn’t enough.
“It’s still waste. There’s still the production of those items. There’s still the shipping,” she said. “Idealistically, we feel good because we’re putting it in the green bin, but a lot of times it ends up in landfill anyway.”
Hawk & Pony also offers jars for a 50 cent deposit, though the cafe is keeping some disposables on hand for the homeless and other customers who might not be able to afford it.
Switching to reusable cups would be extremely challenging for businesses that don’t own dishwashers or rely almost exclusively on to-go business. In those cases, Pope tries to get owners to move away from single-use plastics or seemingly compostable products that are actually lined with plastic.
Pope has approached about 30 cafes in the East Bay so far and said certain owners say they can’t afford to make the switch — better compostables cost more — or they don’t want to inconvenience their customers.
But Pope recalls how the general public eventually got used to carrying around reusable grocery bags after California banned single-use plastic bags in 2014. What would it take for everyone to carry a reusable mug?
Bourque similarly hopes Berkeley’s Vessel program will get people thinking more about their reliance on disposable foodware, not just at coffee shops but at restaurants, picnics and family barbecues.
“There might be a broader cultural impact that’s much greater than just the single-use cup,” he said.
Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker
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