The For Here Campaign
Reducing Waste, One Mug at a Time
Client: Self-Initiated Community Campaign
Sector: Food & Beverage / Sustainability
Location: Boise, Idaho
Campaign Duration: June 2025
Participating Businesses: 11 local coffee shops
The Challenge
Each year, Americans throw away over 50 billion disposable coffee cups, most of which are lined with plastic, making them unrecyclable. In Boise, businesses make up only 6% of waste accounts but generate 64% of the city’s total landfill contribution. Disposable cups are an often-overlooked but impactful waste stream, especially in a city with a vibrant, coffee-loving culture.
The Opportunity
Turning a small habit—asking "for here or to go?"—into a big impact. Coffee shops are neighborhood anchors and trendsetters. They interact with hundreds of people every day and are uniquely positioned to influence cultural habits.
The barista’s at these coffee shops are ‘multipliers,’ changing a single question at the register influences customer behavior and makes it easier to choose better options for the planet.
The Solution
In June 2025, HMK Impact launched The For Here Campaign, partnering with 11 Boise-area coffee shops to intentionally prompt customers to choose reusable mugs when dining in. Each shop received a free toolkit, signage, tracking resources, and custom impact reports. Our goal was to:
Reduce the number of disposable cups used
Encourage thoughtful consumer choices
Showcase business-led sustainability as accessible and impactful
Results
Across the month:
12,303 reusable mugs were used instead of disposables
403,320 grams of CO₂ were saved—the equivalent of nearly 1,000 miles of driving
If the same habits continued across all 43 known Boise coffee shops:
476,127 cups could be avoided per year
Equal to nine full garbage trucks of waste never created
Equivalent CO₂ savings of six domestic flights
Insights from the Field
Participating shops saved a daily average between 20 and 115 cups daily.
Several shops already had “For Here” practices in place but agreed to join our concerted effort to spread awareness.
One shop explored going fully “for here” with no disposable cups for a day.
Others engaged customers directly with raffles and signage, reinforcing the shift in habit.
The highest traffic store would save nearly $4000/year in disposable cup purchases, even considering buying more mugs, potential breakage, water, and dishwasher maintenance.
Why It Matters
It would take a single person over 33 years to achieve what 11 businesses did in one month. That’s the power of embedded business practices.
This campaign proved that small shifts in business operations can lead to outsized community and environmental benefits. No legislation, no excessive implementation costs, no infrastructure changes—just a better question asked at the right moment. And the results were tangible.
