If you’re going to base your company in one of America’s greenest cities, expect that expectations will be high.
Recently, Green Earth News talked about one of the Starbucks Dilemma – the choice of paper cup vs. foam cup. It turned out to be a trick question – both foam and paper cups require too much energy to make and often find their way to landfills in our country. But the Starbucks dilemma continues with a recent shareholder meeting resulting in a “no” vote to proposed recycling initiatives. This past April, the company’s proposed recycling initiative garnered only 11% of the shareholders vote, far too little to make an impact.
To be fair, Starbucks has made great strides with in-store water & energy conservation and green building initiatives. Beyond the stores, the coffee giant is practicing environmental stewardship by expanding their efforts to protect rainforests in their coffee-growing communities.
But recycling, the most visible green initiative to the consumer is lagging nationwide. Starbucks does use 10% recycled content in the 3 billion coffee cups the stores use in a year but think about it: have you ever seen a recycling bin in a Starbucks? Currently only 399 of its 7,529 locations offer front-of-store recycling. So if anyone is looking to recycle their paper cup, their Frappucinno glass bottle or their Ethos plastic water bottle, they’d better hold onto it and find recycling options elsewhere. For that matter, one should question why more recycled content isn’t used for all of its beverage containers?
A huge hurdle for Starbucks is the processing of coffee cups at recycling mills. Many mills say that coffee cups take longer to process, therefore costing them more money. If they do take coffee cups, the cups become part of a fiber stream called mixed paper, one of the cheapest types of recycled paper. Surprisingly China buys half of the mixed paper collected and produced in the United States but Chinese custom officials are strict about not allowing materials contaminated by food to enter their country.
But just as Coca-Cola created their own market for recycling in an effort to meet their 2015 goal of recycling 50% of their cans and bottles, Starbucks has taken steps, albeit smaller ones, to show how easy it could be to recycle paper cups. They have partnered with two mills in small-scale tests to turn their cups into napkins to be used in the stores. Last fall, it sent cups from seven stores to the program with success.
But one step forward and two steps backward with their new Starbucks reward program. The revamped rewards program will offer consumers free coffees, refills, trial offers and other little extras to thank them for their loyalty. And all of these freebies will be PRINTED up and MAILED to your house. Assuming that Starbucks will recycle on the back-end, this still leaves the fact that trees and energy are needed to produce the cards. As it stands, it takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail arriving in our mailboxes and the manufacturing of said mail releases more greenhouse gas emissions per year than the emissions released by a little over 9 million average passenger cars. Why must Mother Earth be punished in order to reward customers?
What can the consumer do? Question why the rewards cannot be tracked electronically and bring a reusable cup on the next trip to Starbucks. In the meantime, let’s hope that the Starbucks shareholders will live up to the high expectations of the eco-conscious consumer and get the company on board for recycling and out of our nation’s landfills.
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Not actually a loss of topsoil itself but the disintegration via rainfall of the minerals which make topsoil so fertile.
{ 2 trackbacks }