Via the outstanding coffee news website Sprudge.com comes this hypnotic and also creepy video of a breakthrough in scientific coffee sleeve technology.

As you can see from the video, the clever inventors of the Heatswell cup have found a way to attach a thin layer of substance (plastic? Polymer?) to a disposable paper coffee cup.  When the cup is heated (as when you pour coffee into it) the layer self-inflates.  It's a cup and a cup sleeve all in one!  Except icky and weird, and oddly bumpy.

One marketing gimmick is that the sleeve can be made to self-inflate in the logo of the company.  The video includes a self-inflating sleeve that pops up a version of the Starbucks logo.  I say "a version" because it's kind of a Rorschach test, trying to decipher the logo from a bunch of spiky bumps.

Will these sleeves be cost-effective for coffee companies?  Maybe.  It's difficult to imagine how a pre-attached self-inflating coffee sleeve could be cheaper than a little ring of corrugated cardboard, even though the website says that it does.  Will it attract attention at trade shows and other special demonstrations?  Absolutely.  In fact, I think if you tried to deploy these in an actual coffee shop, you would quickly end up with a zombified knot of customers, transfixed by the self-inflating action.

Frankly, my gut level reaction to this is that it's going in the wrong direction.  Paper coffee cups, not to mention paper coffee cups with bizarre high-tech self-inflating sleeves, are an appalling waste of resources.  All the fuel required to harvest the trees, all the chemicals required to bleach them into pulp, all the transportation costs - if most people could see the actual carbon footprint for their wee little paper coffee cup, they would be horrified.

And all this for a single-use item.  You use the cup once and throw it away.  All that use of materials and resources and fuel consumption for something that holds a hot beverage for what, maybe 15 minutes?  I know I sound like a cranky old loon, like a female Andy Rooney reborn as a member of the ecological mafia, but that is exactly the kind of unquestioning, self-centered behavior that is sending our planet to hell in a handbasket.  

I appreciate that the Heatswell is "recyclable and biodegradable," according to its inventor.  I'll just take that at face value and assume that (unlike so many other things labeled either "recyclable" and/or "biodegradable").  What I'm pushing back against is the single-use cup culture as a whole.  Why make a better or easier single-use cup?  

I think what we need is a better repeated-use cup.  Personally I think that someone should set up a system similar to milk bottles.  A local dairy here in Skagit County sells their milk through several local stores.  The first time you buy it, you pay a $2.50 deposit for the bottle.  When you finish the bottle, rinse it out and turn it in with your next milk purchase.  I don't understand why we can't do this for coffee cups, too.

I'm sorry.  Let me climb back off my high horse.  Anyone got a stepladder?

The name "Heatswell" is a master stroke of genius.  I definitely have to give them credit for that.  You've got Heat + Swell, and Heats + Well, all in one.  So there's that.