Cafe owner promotes world free of disposable cups
For Chung Da-woon, the Bottle Factory cafe located in Seodaemun in Seoul is a dream in the making.
A former packaging designer for LG Electronics, Chung, 39, wants cafes free of disposable cups and is trying to fulfill her dream with a small local initiative.
“Packaging design was fun but all were thrown away at the end. In back of my head, I had always hoped materials that were used for packaging could be reduced dramatically because otherwise they were going to be a waste. I also hoped all packaging materials that were used would be recyclable,” Chung said during a recent interview with The Korea Times. The rules of her cafe are simple. Those who stay are served in glass or pottery cups.
Those who take out their drinks can do so only in in tumblers provided by the cafe. The customers do not have to pay anything to take out the tumbler, but should return it. To those who come to her cafe often, she encourages them to be a cafe member so that they can have their own tumbler for take-out drinks. To date, she has a little more than 100 members. Bottle Factory does not offer plastic straws, either.
The tumblers in her cafe were donated by people from all across the nation. They came from a donation advertisement posted last year on Instagram. “Almost 500 have been collected. Some came from Jeju Island,” she said with excitement.
In the long run, she wants to make a network of cafes so that “customers who take out tumblers can return them wherever they want.”
The returned tumblers are managed by a phone application and are washed and sanitized altogether.
“Many details should be worked out but I am working on the solutions. From next year, I am hoping to start to create the application,” Chung said.
Last year, she tried out her idea of a cafe network for one week. Her cafe and other like-minded cafe owners in the neighborhood collected take-out tumblers.
This year again, she is organizing the experiment — it will be for two weeks with the participation of six cafes, three bakeries and one rice cake shop.
What she is trying can’t be better supported than now when reducing waste, particularly plastic, is high on people’s mind. From last year, the government placed a strict ban on coffee shops serving drinks in disposable cups
Her interest in disposable cups started when she was with the LG Electronics.
“I drank a lot of coffee and many did in my office. One day, I had my coffee cup ready to be discarded, but couldn’t do it because it was full. Looking at that bin, I had sort of reckoning: I am using so many coffee cups. How many cups would be collected from an entire building and an entire city? I was wondering if these were recycled.”
The curiosity led her to follow a trash truck driver, only to discover none were recycled. She tried to do something but nothing seemed to work.
“I had good ideas but they were different from actions. I realized LG was too big to do what I wanted to do.”