Mama Gone Green is a blog dedicated to raising happy children and reducing our impact on the Earth. My name is Taryn and I am the mother of 2 young kids and an environmental studies instructor at a community college in Portland, Oregon. Please join me as I journey through life as a mama, teacher, knitter, photographer, gardener, and environmentalist!

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A Little Bit Ironic.....

OK, has anyone else ever gone out to eat and had their child's water come in one of these plastic cups (see above)? This cup is cute and since it has a lid and a straw, it is practical, and Finn loves them because he can take them home with him. Well, here is my problem..... The restaurant, which is washing and reusing the rest of their dishes is now giving my child a disposable cup. I understand they may want to serve him in something spill-proof and non-breakable, but couldn't they invest in plastic cups with lids that THEY could wash and reuse? Now I get stuck with this flimsy plastic cup that I don't really want to wash and reuse because I have no idea what harmful chemicals may be leaching from it into my son's body. But, I feel guilty NOT reusing it, and simply throwing it away, so I try to reuse it for awhile for things like water for painting.... but we don't need it, and I get annoyed that it is cluttering up the house, and eventually it goes into the recycling.
And the worst part about these things is that they all seem to have these environmental messages on them (again, see above). I mean, I guess a message about being good to the earth is better than one about buying more stuff you don't need, but I just find it a little bit ironic that my 3 year old is served water in a disposable plastic cup (which requires fossil fuels to make and transport and is meant to be thrown away) and the message on that cup is to be good to our Earth. Hmmmm..... I just don't get it.
OK, thanks for letting me vent. Pin It Now!

4 comments:

  1. I HEAR you- if you and I went to dinner we'd talk about this- we always take them home too- what REALLY get me annoyed is that a lot of restaurants have free refills which my monkeys are unfortunately very aware of- so when they ask for a refill even if it is the same drink they will often bring a new disposable cup.
    I have never gotten one with a environmental message- you can be sure that if I had I'd be talking about it too!!

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  2. don't get me started about drinks at restaurants. They seem to either come in a gigantic GLASS or in one of these piece of garbage cups. I hate to admit it, but we leave them behind, and hope that the restaurant is recycling, we are in the bay area, which is very big in recycling so I am assuming anyways... but you never know.

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  3. very true. the message on this cup is a lame justification for producing plastic cups like these in the first place. in reality even reusing the cup a couple of times doesn't make up for the damage made.
    i wonder if the restaurant owner would consider buying real reusable drink-wear for kids if you pointed out what bothers you. i'm sure you're not the only patron with this opinion.

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  4. True- I probably should get up the courage to just say something. Maybe if enough of us did, something would change!

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