![]() ![]() 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 trash added about 1.3 million tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, out of Starbucks’ total that year of 16 million tons.Ĭountless Instagram sites with names like #starbucksgarbage feature Frappuccino and plastic-lined paper coffee cups discarded across the world, items that contribute to the 8.8 million tons of plastics dumped in the world’s oceans each year. The $128 billion giant generated about 868,000 tons of waste in 2018 alone, according to an audit by consultancy Quantis and the World Wildlife Fund, which Starbucks commissioned. 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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