Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work: yellow bike approach to reuseable containers

Toronto wants to ban disposable coffee cups in addition to plastic bags.

If they do this, then if you want a coffee while away from home, you'll have to carry a mug around with you all day. This would work for office workers, who can keep their mug on their desk and wash it in the sink, but it won't work for people who are on the move all day or work outdoors or for whom spontenous coffee comes up. ("Want to go for a coffee?" "I can't, I don't have a mug with me.") If this goes through, people will have to carry a couple of totebags and a coffee mug around with them all day just so they can go through the normal everyday activities of grabbing a quick coffee if they feel the need or pick up a couple of things for dinner on the way home. This isn't a huge deal for car people, who have basically a small room in which to store anything they might have to carry around, but it's a major inconvenience for pedestrians and transit users. We're supposed to be getting people out of their cars too, and this doesn't pass the skirt heels handbag test.

It would be brilliant if they could solve this by taking a yellow bike approach to mugs and tote bags. You can pick up a reuseable at the place where you buy your coffee/groceries, then you can just leave it somewhere when you're done. Maybe you could leave the tote bags in the lobby of your apartment building. Maybe you could leave the mugs anywhere in the city that sells coffee. In any case, drop-off locations would be plentiful and convenient. Then someone would pick them up (job creation!), the mugs would be washed sanitarily, and they'd be taken back to retailers for reuse.

Obviously the logistical problems are overwhelming. They'd need massive numbers of drop-off locations to make this convenient for people. Getting the right numbers of containers back to the right retailers would be complicated. Who would pay for all this? I have no idea! That's why I classified it under Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work instead of Things They Should Invent, but I'd love to be proven wrong.