As a group of three students from the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human-Centred Design program at Algonquin College, we created Round Table, a way to reduce single-use coffee cups as a school project in collaboration with Zero Waste Canada. Round Table is a student-led club that partners with cafes and restaurants across campuses to serve coffee in well-designed, reusable cups. By promoting shared ownership of cups in the community and ensuring coffee cups never reach a landfill or incinerator, Round Table helps campuses move towards a zero-waste system.
Canadians are ranked third worldwide in ordering coffee ‘to go’ (McCarthy, 2017). Figure 1 illustrates coffee-to-go orders as a share of total coffee orders by country. Around 5 billion cups of coffee are consumed ‘to go’ every year in Canada.
Fig. 1. Worldwide ranking of Canada in terms of total coffee-to-go orders.
With no single-use plastic ban regulations covering single-use cups in effect federally, the extensive consumption of single-use plastic cups stands to be a major cause of environmental waste in Canada.
Our chosen demographic is Canadian post-secondary students. Coffee sales have been increasing across Canadian campuses (Duhatschek, 2018), and if we can start with our own campus, we can create a model for other institutions. As students are the future young professionals of our society, we feel there is an opportunity to help them establish sustainable practices before they enter the workforce.
Our team engaged in a co-design process over 7 weeks with our partner, Zero Waste Canada (ZWC), meeting regularly with their team and subject-matter experts. After spending the first 2 weeks undertaking secondary research on waste in Canada, we focused on single-use disposable cups and created personas, an iceberg model, and a system map.
We have envisioned two significant personas for this project to help guide design decisions.
A system map of students buying coffee on campuses in Canada, shown in Figure 4, outlines different areas where change is possible. Whether a student receives coffee in a reusable cup or a single-use cup depends on such factors as:
Fig. 2. Map of the system of students buying coffee on campuses in Canada.
To make the greatest impact on the system, we chose to focus on the people who have the most control in the system: policymakers, regulators, cafe owners, and decision-makers in head offices of large coffee chains like Starbucks or Tim Hortons.
A student-led club called Round Table that aims to rethink how students consume coffee on campuses by reducing single-use coffee cups and promoting reusable cups.
Every design decision made as part of our solution follows principles that relate directly back to the top of the Zero Waste Hierarchy as seen in Figure 3.
Fig. 3. Design Principles for Round Table & The Zero Waste Hierarchy from Zero Waste International Alliance
Each principle supports rethinking and redesigning the system, reducing potential waste, and promoting reuse in the move toward zero waste.
A walkthrough below, shown also in Figure 4, shows how Round Table can promote the shared ownership and continued use of reusable cups across campus:
Fig. 4. A storyboard walkthrough showing how Round Table provides a reusable cup service that removes the need for single-use disposable coffee cups
While students enjoy their coffee, Round Table members collect the cups from the drop boxes (Figure 5). The cups are scanned to verify their return and the deposits are returned to students. The cups are sent to industrial dishwashers onsite for thorough cleaning.
Fig. 5. Round Table manages the washing & sanitization of the cups.
Round Table aims to succeed by creating strong partnerships and fostering community engagement. The following are partnerships that will be key for Round Table’s early success (see Figure 6):
Fig. 6. Partnerships to help Round Table succeed.
The three pillars of Community, Business & Government as identified by Zero Waste Canada are integral parts of our solution.
Student Engagement
We have a community of students who are positively engaged right from the creation of the club to seeing the number of uses for each reusable cup as they participate in this initiative. Figure 7 is a mockup of a screen that will be displayed to students when they scan the QR code while returning their cup at a dropbox location. By offering incentives like a free coffee after students return their 10th reusable cup and the convenience of dropping off these cups at various drop-boxes across campus, we aim to increase uptake from students.
Fig. 7. Round Table members can see the results of their participation in the reusable cup initiative.
Policy Considerations
Round Table will work with Algonquin College's Food & Conference Services, the Student Association, and Risk Management to ensure the safety of reusable cups. Due to COVID-19, food & conference services paused incentive programs for reusable cups brought in by customers; however, they expect a green light to resume the program in January 2022. The dining hall at uOttawa turned to reusable takeout containers from OZZI during the pandemic.
Round Table will initially start off as a pilot project on one campus (Algonquin College, Ottawa) focusing just on single-use coffee cups. The plan includes gradual expansion from coffee cups to other beverages and to other food containers while paralleling scaling from one campus to another (Carleton University, Ottawa & University of Ottawa, Ottawa) in the region, as shown in Figure 8. The ultimate goal is to achieve adoption from most if not all post-secondary institutes across Canada.
Fig. 8. Round Table will scale to include other food & beverage containers & to other campuses.
Our team plans to use the following metrics to measure the success of our proposed intervention:
Fig. 9. Success metrics for Round Table
After thoughtful consideration and rounds of early validation with ZWC, there are a few potential challenges that the team has identified which might act as roadblocks or affect the perfect implementation of Round Table. These are as follows:
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