Green Cup
The Problem
Green Cup is focused on tackling one terrible habit: tossing out coffee cups after a single use. Right now in America, more than 450 million coffee cups are consumed every day. Of those, only 1% are properly recycled. The rest are sent to landfills and oceans. The plastic lining inside these coffee-cups make it hard to recycle. Though there are control measures taken by big coffee chains like Starbucks to offer reusable coffee cups, in our customer discovery we found out that Out of 200 coffee drinkers interviewed at Starbucks, 40% (80/200) are not aware that Starbucks sells reusable coffee cups. 14%(28/200) has consumed coffee in a reusable cup at least once. 90% (25/28) of those who bought said they have not used the cup more than once. Users forget their cup at their home most of the times.
Our Proposal
Green Cup provides reusable, high-quality coffee cups to address the pain points of consumers who want to incorporate sustainable practices into their current lifestyle. Our cups-as-a-service solution offers environmentally-conscious coffee drinkers a convenient way to avoid single-use cups. Via monthly or yearly subscriptions, Green Cup will sell our cups-as-a-service to coffee shops and other businesses, which will then distribute the cups to our end users (coffee drinkers). After drinking their coffee, consumers will then dispose of their Green Cups at designated drop-off kiosks, which will be placed at convenient locations within close proximity to cafes. (Think of these kiosks as a kind of play on bike-sharing, where you might pick up a bike at one location and drop it off at another.) The cups would then be collected, washed and returned to coffee shops for re-circulation. Our cups will be sustainably produced and augmented with inventory-tracking technology that will enable us to analyze real-time supply chain traceability of our cups, as well as insightful data on consumers’ coffee-drinking habits. Here is the link to the experimentation of this idea: https://youtu.be/qghSvG9tQG0
We Assume that...
Below are my hypothesis, 1) I assume that coffee shops would be willing to sell reusable coffee cups in their stores
2) I assume that our supply chain could be seamlessly integrated to provide a supply of reusable coffee cups on a timely basis
3) I assume that people would return the coffee cups in the drop-off kiosks without forgetting at work place or at home
Constraints to Overcome
People definitely wanted to contribute to the elimination of single use plastics. However, currently they do not have a Convenient solution that could fit into the lifestyle. This problem I believe is cultural. Coffee drinking is not mostly a social experience in US. Hence, our solution would cater to the people who are buying coffee cups on the go.
Current Work
Feature | Priority | Time to Complete New coffee cup design ★★★★★ 6 Hours Material selection for the cup ★★★★★ 6 Hours Generating a Sustainability report on the choice of material(partner with students or outsource at the worst case) ★★★ 5 days FCC Certification ★★★★★ 7 days Meeting a licensing manger to talk about he possibility of holing the IP of my project ★★★★★ 2 hours A new drop-off kiosk design that would not have affordance to take back the cup once dropped off ★★★★★ 6 hours Connecting UHF Antenna to the UHF Scanner to increase the scanning range ★★★★★ 3 hours A mobile application for user ★★★★★ 14 days Database management (to track cup and user ID, generate APIs) ★★★★★ 7 days