What ever happened to all the fuss and glory over Stanley cups?
For a year or two they were the hot thing women wanted for cool drinks, and all you ever heard about – whether from girls and women collecting them and showing them off, or from funny memes and comics making fun of that silliness. Now, however, Stanley cups don’t even register on the blip of radar as women are mourning Styrofoam cups.
Virginia has banned single-use expanded polystyrene, which most people call Styrofoam (after a brand of it), starting at the end of this month for food vendors with 20 or more locations, and at the end of June 2026 for all of them, big and small.
That law didn’t exactly sneak up on us: The General Assembly passed the single use foam containers ban in 2021.
However, as worthwhile and “it’s about time!” that this law is, somehow I missed any and all of the news leading up to the ban and its implementation. I only became aware of it when women all over MHC started blaming Chick-Fil-A for ruining their monstrously big cups of iced tea and Dr. Pepper which apparently they expected to be cold all day, and depended upon that foam cup to make happen.
It seems the criminal foam cup has knocked the once revered Stanley cup off its pedestal. Women (for some reason – to generalize – men just don’t seem to care as much) have been moaning and groaning so much over losing their foam cups that they’ve forgotten all about those silly Stanley cups they were once so crazy over.
The Stanley company long has made drinking vessels used most often by blue-collar men. In the early 2020’s the Stanley cup – a fancy, reusable water tumbler from the Stanley brand – started being coveted and purchased by women. Stanley cups keep cold drinks cold and hot drinks hot for a long time. They come in different colors and designs. A popular version of it is the 40-ounce one, called “Quencher,” with a huge handle. Another Stanley cup comes in a 64-ounce size. That’s half a gallon. Those cups cost $45 to $55 each, or more.
You can even get little vests and coats for your Stanley cup, which have all sorts of little pockets in them to store your stuff. It’s like you have a tight, pocketed-up purse, just with water inside, and you store your belongings on its outsides.
Other women prefer sticking rhinestones and such all over their Stanley cups in designs. Talk about a craze.
Stanley cups made the news a lot, not just for the crazy collecting. A woman’s car burnt up in a fire, but the Stanley cup in the center cup holder still had ice inside it. A video of that went viral.
Of all the things to stand up for, why choose foam cups? It’s used once, then is trash forever and ever and ever. That foam does not and cannot decompose. And they don’t even remain just “cup” trash. They break down into tiny plastic pieces that animals mistake for bits of food, or they just get into the animal’s body by being stuck to the real food the animal is eating. The foam eventually breaks down so small it becomes microplastics that end up everywhere – in our rivers, our oceans, our drinking water, our soils, our food chain and the air we breathe.
How dare we ruin the future environment for generations to come just for a short part of our day with a cold drink in our car’s cupholder?
A lot of women are angrily saying they are going to start bringing their own foam cups to Chick-Fil-A and pour their drinks into them.
OK, who cares? Throughout the history of civilization, people brought their own cups with them everywhere. This whole assumption that we’d be provided with disposable cups is only a blip on the radar of the history of time.
The first disposable cup was the Dixie cup, developed in 1907 by Lawrence Luellen of Boston. It was a paper cup made waterproof by being coated in wax. He apparently didn’t create it as a convenience but as a health improvement, to give people an alternative to sharing glasses or dippers at public supplies of drinking water (at least – those people who weren’t foresightful enough to bring their own cups).
Foam cups didn’t come into use until the 1960s, though the technology was invented earlier. That’s a long time for such trash and pollution to accumulate.
Instead of having a fit over the disappearing foam cup, ladies, just get that Stanley cup back out from your kitchen cabinet, put it back into your car’s cupholder, and pour that double-walled paper-and-plastic cup of tea or Dr. Pepper right into it.
It will all be OK in the end.
