They say Melbourne has the best coffee in the world, and they’re not wrong. I arrived last June expecting sunny days and white beaches. Instead I found myself in a city where espresso is an art form and baristas are revered like DJs. Where even the grungiest laneway cafes serve beans roasted with a philosophy. But for all of Melbourne’s obsession with coffee, there was one detail I couldn’t ignore and that I briefly studied in my sustainability module: the sea of single use cups.
Each morning I stumbled to my local cafe, joining the queue of locals waiting for their almond lattes and flat whites, and I’d watch them leave one by one, takeaway cup in hand. And each time the barista passed over a lid and cup combo, I felt quite a sting of contradiction. How could a city so thoughtful about how coffee is made be so careless about how it’s carried?
My first few weeks abroad, I fell into the same rhythm almost immediately, early lectures fueled by coffee on the go. I would tell myself the cups were compostable, they are not Katy.
One of my modules in my first trimester, Global Environmental systems, I wrote a paper on plastic pollution. Discovering, Australians discard roughly 1 billion disposable coffee cups per year, roughly 2.7 million daily. Single use plastics make up a ⅓ of the litter in Victoria’s environment and it is difficult and costly to clean up. Monash University estimated around 760,000 annually from its campuses alone, highlighting how concentrated consumption is in Melbourne itself. Where, there are bans now on single use plastic straws and cutlery but why not coffee cups? Showing, for all of Melbourne’s sustainability goals, it was brewing a silent storm.
One day, while on the go in Collingwood, I stopped by Into cafe for a quick coffee, only to be politely refused a takeaway as I didn’t have my own reusable cup. I was humbled to say the least. The barista said, “You can sit in, you know. There’s no rush”.
I was taken back from her honesty, about embracing being present. I started to see our takeaway culture as an addition to convenience. I saw myself too, a study abroad student who flew across the world to learn about sustainability, then threw a cup each day for the sake of speed. Even after continuously learning about the SDGs, especially SDG 11 and 12, you get trapped within society’s unsustainable norms. Therefore, I started taking my laptop with me, embracing to sit in with my coffee in a reusable cup.
Melbourne taught me how to drink better coffee, but more importantly it taught me how to live more slowly consciously. To let sustainability seep into the smallest everyday rituals. Because in the end, climate action doesn’t always start with grand speeches and gestures, it starts with saying no to a lid.
