Whistling Dixie Past a Graveyard

This ad for styrofoam Dixie cups has been running in the local papers of late. You may recognize the cup -- it's become the symbol for takeout coffee on television. (I think I'll start to keep track of each time I see one.)

The purpose of the ad is to encourage caffeine fiends to buy styrofoam cups for their morning brew, rather than using an old-fashioned ceramic cup or a reusable plastic travel mug.

It struck me as both retrograde in terms of its environmental impact and even as just plain odd -- I mean, buying several full-page, four-color ads in a newspaper? To encourage people to ditch their "I heart Grandma" mugs in favor of disposable styrofoam?

This made me wonder what's up at Dixie in these days of reduce-reuse-recycle.

With a little jaunt over to the Wikipedia, I quickly found that Dixie is owned by Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in the world, based on revenue. As I seem to recall from the book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, Koch Industries is based in Wichita, and its top executives (brothers Charles and David Koch) are well-known free marketeers whose family foundation funds the Cato Institute as well as a number of other libertarian and conservative causes.

So I guess it stands to reason that Koch-owned Dixie doesn't believe in global warming or any of that other liberal environmental hoohah. Although one could make the argument that styrofoam cups are actually more environmentally sound than paper -- less pollution output in creating them, more recylable in theory. They don't break down in a landfill, of course, but then, neither does paper in most cases (plus, the paper is coated in a thin film of plastic).

But the key argument is, Why use them at all for your coffee in your own home? Didn't conservative used to have something to do with conserving? And last time I checked, "conserve" was pretty much the opposite of "waste."

(And yes, I know the title of this post is a mixed metaphor.)