the Unexpressed Advantage

Some of the people who live in my college grew a tree from paper cup seeds that you can get at Starbucks® and other prominent coffee bean locales. It's quite pretty, but they're also trying to make a statement. The statement is that when you purchase coffee in these paper cups, instead of throwing the paper cups away, you can use them to make a pretty tree.

I think this is useful for us environmental types, because it gives us an alternative to throwing away the paper cups, which leads to less overall trees, or recycling the paper cups, which just leads to more paper cups and no more trees. This way we can use the paper cups to re-create the trees that they came from. And the best thing: it takes way less paper cups to make a paper-cup tree than paper cups that an actual tree produces. This is like super-uber recycling because it results in many trees from one tree. Now I can feel exceptionally good about asking for a paper cup instead of a mug when I have fogotten my travel mug but still want to have warm coffee. Because when you get it in a mug it gets cold really quick. Too quick.

DK