Art sheds light on coffee consumption

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By Heather Travis
Thursday, January 15, 2009
A Tim Horton's cup is a Canadian icon and can be spotted keeping mitts warm at local arenas, steaming up break rooms or waking up students across The University of Western Ontario's campus.
 
 
Visual Arts student Lorraine Thomson turns used Tim Horton’s coffee cups into an art display about the environmental impact of the hot beverage.
 
But, with so many people consuming pots of the brown liquid on a daily basis, Lorraine Thomson says the evidence is piling up against the amount of waste produced by each cup of coffee. Thomson, a third-year Visual Arts student, decided to take up the issue of consumer culture and its impact on the environment in her term project appropriately titled Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large.
 
The idea to focus on the Tim Horton’s cup was not born out of a dislike for the coffee – admittedly she goes to Tim Horton’s herself – but from an image she saw last summer in a London-area park of a Canadian goose nest with a Tim Horton’s cup in it.
 
“Are they so prevalent that even the geese are using it?” she says.  
 
These cups are largely considered non-recyclable, although the company says select recycling facilities, including one in Windsor, Ont., can accept the cups. At Western, the coffee cups are listed as non-recyclable items to be placed into waste containers.
 
“We just use and turf,” says Thomson.  
 
For two weeks she collected emptied Tim Horton’s coffee cups in the Visual Arts and North Campus Buildings in a garbage container she painted to resemble to brown and gold brand. Including a number of cups she received from EnviroWestern, Thomson accumulated a total of about 600 cups in the two-week period.  
 
But she didn’t stop there.
 
It was a dirty job sorting through the used coffee cups to find the ones that were acceptable for her recycled paper-making project, she says. Adding to the less-than-glamourous process, Thomson tossed ripped cup pieces into her household blender, added water and turned the cups into a pink mash. The liquefied material was poured over screens and later dried out in sheets to make paper.  
 
After molding the paper over Tim Horton’s cups, Thomson refashioned a recycled version of the beverage containers in the various ordering sizes and modeled one for every day of the week.  
 
She also used the paper to make a photo album in which she displayed pictures of her process, and a lampshade.
 
“I think they are an attractive, aesthetically pleasing sculpture,” she says. “If I can do something with these cups, are you sure they are not recyclable?”  
 
Thomson has always been concerned with recycling and environmentalism, but after completing the art project, she says “I definitely use my recyclable cup.”  
 
Although the project focused on Tim Horton’s cups, Thomson was not trying to single-out the company for it sustainability practices. She believes all companies and individuals should take responsibility for the amount of waste they produce and examine ways of reducing this environmental impact.
 
“How do we change the minds of the community of people at Western or London at large? I don’t have all the answers but a least I am doing my part,” she says. “It’s not going to change until we quit buying things that are not recyclable.”  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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