Olivia Fendrich / The Mossy Log
AS A SENIOR living on campus with a seemingly endless amount of flex points, I find myself visiting our on-campus cafes multiple times a week to treat myself to an iced vanilla latte, hot chocolate or cinnamon croissant. While decorating my apartment, I was overjoyed at the prospect of making my coffee each morning in my cute, reusable glass tumblers with a matching straw, aesthetically enabling my growing caffeine addiction.
For strange reasons that are entirely within my control, making my own breakfast and coffee is difficult when I wake up precisely 17 minutes before I need to be seated in class. This leaves me with the glowing opportunity to, yet again, visit the Troom on my walk to Bio or the Dovecote as I journey to my thesis class and partake in my favorite caffeinated beverages.
One negative result of these trips makes me rightfully guilty in my consistent patronage of these lovely spaces: the knowledge that I use multiple single-use plastic cups during my week. As an environmentally-conscious member of Gen Z, this is deeply embarrassing.
Many places around Portland and in my home state of California not only encourage buyers to bring a reusable cup for their daily beverage, but will often offer small discounts for those who do. Unfortunately, as I have recently found out, this is not the case for our campus. As far as I can tell, the only option we have to use our reusable cups is for the coffee carafes, where professors and students alike enjoy their boring, no-syrup black coffee (no shade, I wish I could be so strong).
The reasoning, I was told, by a Troom worker (in a conversation which happened separately from Mossy Log associated business) was that it was the issue of germs and contamination — they cannot receive potentially unclean dishes into their workspaces. While I respect the idea that cleanliness is of the utmost importance in a space that provides food to hundreds of people within our community, the waste that it produces does not have to be so vast.
When customers bring their own drink container, baristas can prepare everything for said beverage in one of their reusable, stainless steel vessels and simply pour the contents into the container, with no contact necessary. My other suggestion is that there could be reusable containers available to those dining within the Trail Room or Dovecote with a bin to wash dirtied mugs along with the Bon’s dishes at the end of the day.
While this would require more work for those involved with both cafes, as well as trust that people will be careful and respectful of the school’s property, on-campus jobs are incredibly difficult to come by for those with work-study scholarships. Increasing the amount of available positions could be hugely beneficial to students who desire to work on campus.
There is something deeply satisfying about bringing a reusable vessel for your daily coffee that is lost in the redundant discarding of a plastic cup. On a campus where we pride ourselves on being environmentally conscious and care about small-scale impacts, this is one step toward a community that eliminates the unnecessary consumption of single-use plastics.
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