Since the pandemic began, my favorite local coffee shop has stopped letting customers bring their own reusable cups. I’ve been trying to still support them, getting a drink there once a month or so, but it pains me every time I’m handed a paper cup. At first I was trying to find a cafe that would still let me bring my own cup so that I could go back to my usual sustainable ways, but then I realized that I can’t “go back to sustainability”, because I was never truly sustainable in the first place! Even if I bring my own cup, there’s so much else that goes into a drink that needs to change - each ingredient—the coffee/tea, the milk, the sweetener—all come in disposable containers, and many are shipped from very away and produced through unsustainable practices. Even places that make their own nut milks most likely still buy the nuts in plastic bags. This problem goes so much deeper than cups, and it’s important that we take this opportunity to understand the true impact of our actions and change the systems which we live off of for the better, rather than just trying to go back to what we were doing before.