Li’l green peace for coffee shop
City nixes a fine for eco-sign
Kerry Diamond is determined to get rid of single-use plastic at her coffee shop, Smith Canteen — so she put out a sandwich-board sign letting her customers know how much waste they’d kept out of landfills by bringing their own cups.
Her green deed earned her a $300 fine from the Department of Sanitation.
“I was like, oh my God, you have to be kidding me,” Diamond, who is also the editor of food magazine Cherry Bombe, told the Daily News.
The fine was for the placement of the signboard. The message on the offending sign? “We’ve kept 2,057 cups out of the landfill in 2018! Thank you for BYOC.”
That’s Bring Your Own Cup, of course — something that earns customers a 10% discount at Smith Canteen, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Diamond is able to determine how many cups the restaurant has kept out of the landfill by tracking how often customers take that discount.
She just recently added the message to the sign to help get her customers more enthusiastic about bringing their own cup — and noted that the sign is on a corner the shop keeps meticulously clean and free of litter.
“That’s what was a bummer about that,” she said of the fine. “We try so hard to be good and then to get kind of smacked down that way, it’s just kind of a bummer.”
After The News inquired about the fine, the Sanitation Department said it would be withdrawn.
“We’ve investigated the incident and have determined that we will withdraw action on this notice of violation because it appears as if the sign is within the legal 3-foot limit, the street is not a zerotolerance block and there is ample pedestrian access to the sidewalk,” spokesman Vito Turso said. “We encourage the shopkeeper to continue helping to keep cups out of landfills by all legal means.”
Diamond, who planned to fight the ticket, said she was relieved.
“You saved me a big headache,” she said.
Her coffee shop has pledged to stop using all single-use plastic by Jan. 1 — no small feat in an industry that makes heavy use of straws and to-go cups.
She said she was surprised the Sanitation Department hasn’t taken a more active role in helping businesses like hers go greener. By the end of the year, she expects to have saved 3,000 cups from going to the landfill.
“Three thousand cups, for a tiny coffee shop, is a lot when you think about how much space that takes up,” she said. “It costs the city a lot of money to deal with all this garbage that we generate as New Yorkers.”
If anything, the department should pay more attention to picking up the litter along Smith Street, she said, and clearing out city trash cans that are overflowing.
As for coffee customers, she had a message for them, too — that 10% discount goes a long way when you order up a matcha with housemade almond milk.
“Get a reusable cup,” she said. “It’s so easy.”