Starting in the Winter term of 2023, Oregon State University’s Housing and Dining Services (UHDS), in collaboration with Materials Management, implemented a new sustainability initiative to attempt to reduce the amount of single-use coffee cups on campus. At every cafe across OSU’s campus, the menus and registers now reflect a $0.25 charge instead of a discount for bringing a reusable cup which is what the campus has had historically. This menu change was based on similar changes made in cafes, both on and off of campuses in BC, Canada, and Edinburgh, Scotland. This menu model was also implemented and evaluated at a private university in Massachusetts in 2008.
Starting January 9th, 2023, on-campus cafés began charging $0.25 cents for single-use cups. Prior to this implementation, UHDS Marketing launched the first phase of their campaign informing cafe guests of the upcoming changes. Their campaign included a series of posters in cafes, social media posts, and student-manned tabling events that encouraged OSU community members to be more conscious about bringing their reusable when making a café purchase. Additionally, Materials Management surveyed 871 students and campus attendees in February, 793 of whom lived on campus. This survey acted as a means of spreading the word about the menu change, gauging how many students had heard about the change, and collecting data on obstacles and incentives students identified surrounding it. Materials Management determined that after marketing, 51% of respondents had heard of the menu change.
The initial data from Winter Term of 2023 was deemed inaccurate due to the register system’s layout that made the button to add the charge easily forgettable by cashiers. Because of this, Winter Terms’s data showed an exaggerated amount of reusables being tracked as so many people did not get charged. This prompted an update to the register system; a mandatory prompt upon checkout asking the cashier whether the customer was bringing a reusable. This change was implemented in week 9 of Winter Term and continued to the end of the school year. The data used in the analysis of this initiative was taken from the Spring term of 2023; after the register change was implemented.
Ultimately, the data collected suggests that switching to the disposable cup charge caused, on average, 61 more reusable cups to be brought to each café location each week, an increase of 37 from the previous year. Across the university in the Spring of 2022, 232 reusable cups were being used each week. In comparison, 610 reusable cups were being used across the university each week in Spring 2023; an average increase of 377 weekly. This means that there were 4,150 more reusable cup purchases across the entirety of Spring 2023 when compared to Spring 2022. It is also important to note that between Spring of 2022 and 2023, the sales across these cafes were virtually the same concluding that increased sales between these periods was not the cause of the increase in reusable cup usage.
