SIP!

What it does

SIP is an all-in-one product that merges a conventional paper cup, a straw and a cap into one design. It has all the benefits of these conventional objects, but into one design that reduces significantly their environmental impact.

Your inspiration

As we know, more than 500 million disposable straws are used in the US every day and the majority of these are trashed and end up either in landfills or in oceans. Unfortunately, people are used to them and even worse, their use among multinational fast food chains makes it very difficult to eradicate them. Also the conventional straw is usually made from PP; not every type of PP is recyclable and facilities often leave the straw behind. When recycled, most of them escape the recycling pathway due to their small size and light weight, so we had redesign the straw to reduce its environmental impact.

How it works

Our design integrates a foldable straw and a cap into a conventional paper cut-out. The extra length of paper used for creating the straw is firstly folded and then glued via heat to form the straw. This added step is very similar to the technique usually used to fold the cup. Therefore, it isn’t a major production change and can be implemented in a short period of time. Our design also removes a step from the conventional paper cup production, which is, it doesn’t need to fold the cup’s rim to be able to fit a conventional cap since the cap is integrated into our cup. The design also remains low-cost and easily producible in large quantities.

Design process

When we started to redesign the straw to reduce its environmental impact, integrating the straw into the cup seemed like a logical solution. This solves one of the main problems of the straw; it is too small and light to be recycled and gets lost in the recycling process. With this approach we were also able to adapt the straw’s size to the cup’s size therefore reducing a generous amount of plastic in each straw: 77%, 81% and 85% for the big, medium and small cup sizes (Spain) respectively. After figuring out a way to integrate the straw into the cup so that it remains stackable, we came across another problem, the cap. After managing to integrate the cup and the straw into one single object it seemed ludicrous to have the cap made from a different material to then be separated when it comes to recycling or composting. That’s how we came up with SIP which integrates the cup, the straw and the cap into one single product.

How it is different

Doing our research we came across a lot of alternatives to PP plastic straws (recyclable and compostable). They're all great, but they have one problem: recycling and compost facilities are not available everywhere. SIP is made from a PE coated paper, as we like to call it, our “worst case scenario”. A material generally used in countries that have no access to recycling or composting facilities. However, it all starts with a paper cut-out, it is easy to adapt the product to other recycled, recyclable or compostable materials for countries where these facilities are available. But in all cases, our “worst case scenario” remains better than the actual solution for a few reasons: since everything is integrated into one product there is only one material to be disposed and the straw cannot get lost during the recycling process; our design not only reduces the amount of plastic used, but also removes all the individual paper or plastic wrapping for the straws.

Future plans

The next logic step to our project is doing tests into finding the best material alternatives to create a “best case-scenario” SIP. This would logically include a recyclable material and a compostable one, so SIP can offer at least three choices of materials making the design as versatile and ready to be produced in no time. Let us demonstrate that small changes make a big difference.

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