Aluminum cups are being sold at UNC athletic events to promote sustainability

Aluminum cups will now be available at select campus sporting events, as UNC's Athletics Department pushes sustainability. 

The cups are now sold at basketball, lacrosse and all other spring sports games as a part of a pilot program that started with the basketball game on Feb. 1 against Boston College. The 20-ounce cups are being sold for $5 at these select events. Consumers can still buy the original plastic cups for the same price. 

“I think we will continue to evaluate how the program goes at the end of each year like we do with everything," Michael Beale, assistant athletic director, said. "We take a holistic look at it and then see the next steps that we want to take."

The cups are made of aluminum, which is marketed as infinitely recyclable. They are made up of more than 70 percent recycled material and have a high recycling rate.

Ball Corporation, a Colorado-based company that deals in metal beverage packaging, metal aerosol packaging and aerospace, is producing the cups for UNC. 

The Athletic Department said in a statement that Ball Corp. created the aluminum cups to provide a more sustainable option than plastic cups. 

“Aluminum can be recycled over and over and over again," said Jeff Mittelstadt, the executive director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. "That allows it to be more ready, if you will, for trying to move to a circular economy."

A circular economy promotes the reuse of a product over and over again, as opposed to the constant flow of products to the landfill. The pilot program is a project that nominally contributes to the idea of a circular economy. 

But the fate of individual cups will ultimately be up to the consumer. 

"You need consumers to actually put it in the right bins if it is going to be recycled or if they decide to keep it as a souvenir cup at least not have it end up in the waste stream that goes to landfills,"  Mittelstadt said.

Senior Allie Omens is the president of Epsilon Eta Environmental Honors Fraternity and 2019’s recipient of the Three Zeros Environmental Initiative Leadership Award. She is an advocate for the circular economy model and has worked to implement it on campus.

“I think a circular economy involves a paradigm shift, and it involves a change in behavior and reconsidering a lot of these consumer behaviors that we’ve adopted over however many years," Omens said. "That’s not to say that the responsibility for all of this, or really any of this falls on the consumer. It needs to be both the producer and consumer."

The aluminum cups are reusable, but whether or not they will actually be reused is up to UNC athletic event attendees. 

“Our goal for this is to generate awareness and bring to the front of mind to everyone the importance of recycling and making the right decisions," Beale said. "This is just another step on all the different initiatives that we have around recycling."

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