Thursday, November 15, 2007

Coffee in a Cup Made From Corn

Americans drink through and toss away more than 16 billion paper coffee cups a year.
That's a lot of landfill. How much? Oh, about 25 million pounds just for the oil-based plastic coating on the paper cups, and millions more pounds of paper inside the plastic coating.

There's a new, environmmentally friendly coffee cup to fill our caffeine-addicted brains and un-fill our overflowing landfills.

It is part corn, so it requires less energy to manufacture -- and therefore generates less greenhouse gas to make. And the corn-based coating lets the cups be composted instead of landfilled.

It's called 'ecotainer' and its from Internataional Paper. One of the first and biggest customers for this new bio-degradable coffee cup is the Hilton Garden Inn chain of mid-priced hotels.

All 340 Hilton Garden Inns in the US will be using these eco-friendly ecotainers. Maybe the rest of the hotels in the Hilton chain will, too.

A cuppa joe in a cuppa corn. What will they think of next!