Incycle Cups

The Lempert Report
September 25, 2014

There’s no shortage of statistics to highlight the unfortunate truth that Americans go through way too many disposable cups.

Phil: According to startling numbers from Good to Go Cup -  U.S. citizens use 16 billion paper cups each year — which, to produce, require four billion gallons of water (!) and an astonishing 6.5 million trees. 

Innovative minds have been working hard to take a stand against the paper cup. Take for example The Do School in New York who have partnered with the Brooklyn Roasting Company (BRC) in DUMBO to push out ceramic cup share mugs  that participants can bring back to the store to be cleaned up for reuse. But if sharing is not for you, check out this innovative company that uses  existing resources like water bottles to create cups that can then be recycled again and again.

Chris Jacobs, VP of Product Development, MicroGREEN The Incycle Cup is the world’s first recyclable insulating hot cup made from recycled water bottles, juice bottles.  We use 58 billion plastic cups in this country every year, that’s enough to fill Michigan stadium, the largest football stadium in the nation 50 times every year. So, almost weekly. On top of that we also use 1500 water bottles every second in this country. So by using the plastic from these bottles it’s already been created and by creating cups that are not only recycled content but recyclable again, we’re hoping to alleviate those problems. 

On the sustainability side, we use recycled content and that lower environment al footprint, it’s also recycled…where we take the cup back from them, have it flaked and cleaned so it’s a cup to cup closed loop. 

Phil:  Last year, Incycle saved and repurposed 27 million water bottles from landfills.  And for the consumer there are other added benefits. 

Chris:Designed for consumer use. We don’t want consumers to have to change their habits to do something that is better for the world. Just takes a little creativity and a little drive to do that. 

The most innovative thing about the Incycle cup is our ability to stretch the amount of plastic, and get up to 5 times the amount of usable plastic from the same amount of souce material. That does add insulation, it lowers cost because it removes the raw material it lower the environment impact, and that innovation really helped us to bridge the gap of what has been done and the old traditional way of making things were and the new way of problem solving, start at the end and work backwards from it.

More than that, it’s durable.  It’s absolutely unbreakable.  Each bubble acts as a crack attenuator.  It will hold your water. I could have poured hot coffee in here and not been worried. You will not have breakage.