Solo Cup Company

The Solo Cup Company announced this week that it will be closing its plant in Owings Mills as of 2012. Our community will lose a solid neighbor, 540 jobs and a staple of our urban landscape for over 80 years.

But this departure also offers us a chance to think large about small things.

The Solo Cup Company cleverly chose its name way back when to describe the purpose of its singular product: single-use. Having a dinner, a snack or a wild party? On any occasion, just bash and trash.

How irresistible it must have been. In an era when the resources of the world still seemed full and ripe, when memories were painfully fresh of thousands of soldiers dying of infection in the trenches of World War I, when new meant clean, when technology beckoned us toward a more leisurely way of life, the Solo Cup Company introduced a revolutionary product: something you could use once and throw away.

Far beyond its imagination, it would help inaugurate a century and a culture of disposability.

Their mission statement says it all: "Solo will be the company that enriches meal occasions and simplifies life with single-use products that our customers and their customers see as indispensable."

No muss, no fuss. Make a mess, dirty things up and then just throw it all away. You are worth it. The world can take it. Free your time for greater things.

I am sure it sounded like paradise. The vision it offers is one of great abundance: endless resources to feed our endless desires; a bottomless "far away" to hide our mountains of trash; and for women, the extra flattering message that we are valued as more than mere housewives and therefore are now freed from the tyrannical grasp of constant cleaning. (Though for those of us who do our best thinking or most intimate talking over the mindless task of washing dishes, this could be a problem.)

Now, I very well may be mistaken, but I sense that even Solo's proud entrepreneurial geniuses felt a bit uneasy about their invention, as if they knew something in this was amiss. After all, they didn't say that single-use products ARE indispensable, or must become indispensable. They say that single-use products are seen as, perceived to be, indispensable. I see a huge, if unintentional and subtly revealing, hedge in their words.

Compare their mission statement above with this potential version: "Solo will be the company that enriches meal occasions and simplifies life with single-use products that will become indispensable."

And in that little hitch, that "see as" vs "will become", lies the promise and the challenge. It is as if even their own founding fathers, raised in a world of hard work, durability and frugality, could not fully embrace the emerging desires of the world they sought to exploit.

Today, this company that championed trash has leavened its culture of disposability by introducing a new line of sustainable products. Perhaps this is their first step back to recapturing the values they felt they were betraying at their birth. Perhaps soon they, like all other 20th century legacy companies, will choose not to introduce piece-meal green product lines, simply to pander to a strong segment of their consumer base, but rather truly embrace the imperative of sustainability and choose to run their entire operation with sustainable resources and practices, because it is both right and ultimately, the only economical way to run a business.

The question before us now is: what will be done with the Solo property? Perhaps it can be turned into a green educational center for schools? a local park? a suburban orchard? a collection of studios for artists and green craftsmen?

Let's think imaginatively and perhaps begin a dialogue with Solo, and see how their departure can endow us with even greater good.