A San Francisco startup ditched the typical sustainable to-go cups mold, and its cups are taking off. Instead of imitating petroleum-based plastics with alternatives that often require industrial composting or reusables that require returns, GaeaStar’s clay to-go cups offer a sustainable option that doesn’t detract from a customer’s experience.
“Our strategy has been that we want to provide them a nicer, more premium user experience, and drinking out of a ceramic is always nicer than paper and plastic,” Sanjeev Mankotia, GaeaStar’s CEO, told TriplePundit. “You would never drink a fine wine out of a paper cup, so why drink a nice coffee out of that?”
In that manner, Mankotia likened the eggshell-thin clay cups, which are inspired by terracotta tea cups in India, to a Trojan horse. While sustainability is the goal, the startup’s approach prioritizes the experience to get there. With a better product, consumers begin to adapt, Mankotia said.
“Cost is always a concern, and we have a real line of sight to be cost competitive with paper and plastic, which is a very difficult thing to do with other materials,” Mankotia said. But he expects GaeaStar’s clay cups to meet, or even beat, the cost of paper and plastic as the company scales up. “Clay itself, and I’m saying pun intended … is dirt cheap.”
It’s also everywhere, which makes it possible to continue manufacturing locally to meet local demand with local resources even as the company expands. For now, the cups are manufactured in San Francisco, where they’re used by over 200 coffee shops, cafes, hotels and other partners. They’re also shipped to customers in the United States, Canada, South America and Europe, Mankotia said. But, as their popularity increases, the goal is to manufacture the cups locally where demand is high.
For GaeaStar, that looks like building micro-factories about the size of a shipping container in the communities where the cups will be used, Mankotia said. By sourcing the materials locally, it will not need a global supply chain, which in turn will drastically reduce the cups’ carbon footprint.
Disposal is also local, with no need for special facilities. The cups are so thin that they break down into sand from the mechanical force of mixing with the other garbage. “It does go into the regular trash, but it’s made out of mostly sand,” Mankotia said. “Even if it ends up in a landfill, you’re ultimately just throwing sand back into a landfill.”
Theoretically, consumers could even break the cup up themselves and stomp it back into the earth. The cups aren’t made with any microplastics or toxic chemicals that will leach out. Doing so would essentially be putting the materials back where they came from.
The exception is a silicone sipper lid — a temporary solution created in response to feedback from pilot participants, who said the clay cups could be tough to drink from on the go without something to cover them, Mankotia said. GaeaStar intends to replace the lid with a clay one as their engineers perfect a truly spill-resistant design, he said.
On average, customers use the clay cups three to five times, with hundreds of thousands distributed so far. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of paper and plastic disposable cups are used each year, with the vast majority ending up in landfills.
Mankotia said he hopes to eventually disrupt this pattern of waste. “The most sustainable thing society can do is reuse things,” he said. “We should get into the habit of that: and Reuse it as much as you can, but when it does come to its end of life, there is a proper way to handle it, and it’s disposed of, and then the material is not harmful.”
While there wouldn’t be a need to manufacture single-use products in a perfect world, GaeaStar’s clay to-go cups offer a middle option that can help consumers lean into change. If they’re unable to keep the cup for whatever reason, they can toss it in the trash knowing they’re only throwing away dirt. But preferably, they can take the cup home or back to the office to wash and reuse.
“If you go to the market today, the customer has only two choices: They buy the single-use … and they dispose of it after use, or they bring in their own mug,” Mankotia said. “We’re providing a product that empowers the customer to make their own decision.”
