In the end, true change might come with laws. The company’s CEO, Sam Roberts, said in 2019 that he had tried to offer reusable cups with a deposit-as Starbucks plans to do-and found that only 5% of customers wanted them. Boston Tea Party, a British coffee company, suffered a 25% drop in coffee sales after it abandoned single-use coffee cups in 2018. “They looked around, confused,” he says.Ĭhanging consumers’ wasteful habits will not be easy, as other businesses’ experience has shown. He says it turned into an awkward exchange with the barista. “They wouldn’t look at you weird if you asked for a mug.” Forbes recently tried that at a Starbucks café near his home in Monterey, Calif. “Five or 10 years ago, it was easy to go into a Starbucks and get a reusable cup,” says Forbes of Greenpeace USA. Just as millions began returning to offices, grabbing coffees on the way, he told them he thought a Starbucks outlet should be “a place that inspires and nurtures the human spirit,” reflecting a company with “a purpose that goes beyond the pursuit of profit.”Īll that sounds good, but environmentalists say that in the U.S., Americans’ increasing grab-and-go culture has helped drive the company’s growth. Starbucks would not tell Fortune how much it spends on sustainability, saying only in an email that its “sustainability journey is a comprehensive approach, woven into every aspect of our company.”ĬEO Kevin Johnson told investors on an earnings call in April that management had used the lockdown period to work on its environmental strategies. With billions stuck at home, Starbucks’ annual revenue plummeted about 11.3% last year. “We had to go back to them and say, ‘This is huge, you have to step it up,’” MacKerron recalls. The company crafted a plan for reusable cups, says As You Sow, after “months of constructive dialogue” with the group. He says he finally flew to Seattle to meet with Starbucks execs. “Even after that, the company did not exactly jump up and talk to us,” MacKerron notes. In 2019, its shareholder resolution demanding Starbucks stick to its plastic-use commitments won an impressive 44.5% of votes, about a 50% jump on a similar resolution the previous year, signaling rising concern among investors. “They failed that miserably,” says Conrad MacKerron, senior vice president of As You Sow, an environmental shareholder activist group in Berkeley. But by 2018, just 1.3% of Starbucks cups were reusable. That stare might just be one of strong disapproval.īack in 2008, Starbucks promised that by 2015 it would serve one-quarter of its drinks in the U.S. Most ironic, perhaps, is the logo printed on each one: a mythical sea siren that Starbucks says honors its port-city home of Seattle, where the company was founded 50 years ago, and that its website explains is “staring into your soul as you drink your latte.” The company says it will also try to phase out the billion or so plastic straws it uses every year, after the pandemic scuttled its plans to do so by 2020. To some environmentalists, Starbucks’ rollout of reusable cups seems far too tentative given the global plastics crisis the company’s paper cups are plastic-lined, making most of them nonrecyclable. That came after an entire year in which the company eliminated reusable mugs, citing COVID-19 safety. In the United States, Starbucks began a similar two-month trial in five Seattle cafés in April and May, offering reusable cups for $1 deposits, which it returns along with 10 Starbucks Rewards points. The company says it plans to reuse the cups 30 times before discarding them. The rollout will begin during the next few months in France, Germany, and the U.K.-all countries weighing bans on single-use packaging-with customers paying a deposit on each reusable cup, refundable when they return it. After years of ballooning waste, the world’s biggest coffee company announced in early June that it plans to introduce reusable cups in all 3,480 of its outlets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa by 2025. But that ritual could soon change, at least in some countries.
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