School:
UBC
Department:
Economics
Course:
ECON 339
Instructors:
- Catherine Douglas
City of Vancouver:
- Julie LeBlanc
Student Team:
- Janet Chen
- Victoria Kim
- Camilo Mura
- Nemo Anyudan Zhao
Strategy:
- GCAP
City goal area:
- Zero Waste
Barriers and opportunities to reducing single-use cold cups in restaurants.
UBC
Economics
ECON 339
This project recommends solutions to overcome barriers that cafes and restaurants face in reducing the use of single-use cups for cold beverages, as per the City of Vancouver’s Reduction of Single-Use Items (SUI) Strategy.
The team helped inform the knowledge gap between the vendors of SUI cups and the City by reaching out to 8 cafes and restaurants, including 59 retail locations in British Columbia and Alberta. Vendors sold 2000 – 3000 disposable cups per year and participated in various sustainability promotions, including financial incentives with the use of a reusable mug. While this is encouraging, the team learned that vendors faced numerous barriers in their own sales and among customers including sanitation, increasing expenses, lack of composting infrastructures and difficulties in changing consumer behaviour.
Through the Choose to Reuse project, it is suggested the City of Vancouver increase convenience and efficiency of the current business systems set up by investing in more developed equipment. For example, more efficient ways to return mugs and receive your deposit, more streamlined and prompt ways to sort out recycling, and a greater focus on building up more trust between local businesses and customers
As part of the public consultation stage in the implementation of the Single-Use Item policy, the team hopes its research results of barriers, opportunities, and concluding recommendations will support the City of Vancouver’s goal of becoming the greenest city in 2020. They will also share their results with the cafes and restaurants that we interviewed as well as the UBC MugShare program.
An initiative to reduce single-use items by encouraging restaurant patrons to bring reusable containers.
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