By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans.
Starbucks will soon begin a trial to offer reusable cups in its cafes across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) by 2025. In its South Korea stores, as announced earlier, the company will go one step further and eliminate disposable cups in all stores by 2025, making South Koreas the first place where the cStarbucks will phase out disposable cups entirely.
By these measures, Starbucks aims to reduce its massive waste footprint somewhat. According to Bloomberg:
The rapid surge in coffee drinking in many countries during the past two decades fueled an increase in disposable waste. An audit conducted with sustainability consultant Quantis and the World Wildlife Fund found that in 2018 Starbucks dumped 868 metric kilotons of coffee cups and other garbage. That’s more than twice the weight of the Empire State Building.
The initial reusable cups trial will be launched in France, Germany and the U.K. and then expanded to all 3,840 Starbucks outlets across 43 countries in the EMEA region, according to a company statement.
In the pilot projects, Starbucks will trial a Cup-Share program that allows customers to pay a small deposit for a reusable cup for hot and cold beverages. Tested to last up to 30 times and available in three sizes, each cup uses an identifying number associated with the Starbucks reusable cup to the deposit paid. The customer will then be able to use their reusable and return it to Starbucks via a kiosk or at the point of sale. Upon return, Starbucks will give the deposit back to the customer in the form of tender.
As part of the Cup-Share program, Starbucks will be introducing a new reusable cup that uses patented foaming technology that results in a rigid and durable wall structure with up to 70% less plastic than current reusable cups. In addition, this unique wall structure provides insulation for both hot and cold liquids, so that it can be used for both hot and cold beverages without the need for any sleeve, helping to further reduce our resource footprint.
Now, that’s all groovy. Yet thirty uses – that’s not all that much. A month’s worth of coffee, assuming the consumer has a one cup a day Starbucks habit. So, my first question, which I’ve not been able to answer by poring over public statements: what happens to that reusable cup after after uses? Can it be recycled? Yes, a cup that can be used thirty times appears better than ones disposed after each use, but the latter are paper cups with a plastic liner, and the new reusable cups are plastic. So, if those end up in landfills, are we as much better off as we’d like to be? Especially as some consumers will forget to bring back their reusable cups, meaning that Starbucks will not get the full thirty uses out of each reusable cup it provides.
Starbucks will revive other waste reduction programs that were temporarily suspended during the pandemic. According to the company:
This initiative will be in addition to providing a 25-30 pence/cent discount for any customer bringing in their own reusable cup across the region. The company is also re-introducing its 5 pence/cent paper cup surcharge in the U.K. and Germany to encourage reusable usage with funds being directed to environmental charities addressing global waste issues. This re-introduction is compounded by Starbucks stores in Switzerland and Czech Republic also introducing a paper cup charge over the coming weeks.
Note that hese Starbucks program are limited to certain countries. What about the U.S.? We’re far from number one in our waste management policies, and Starbucks has not included the U.S. in the reusable cups pilot. Nor has it announced any plans to eliminate disposable cups entirely in the U.S.. Instead, the company’s efforts are limited to a measly initiative to resurrect another programs suspended during the pandemic. And according to NJ.com:
Starbucks soon will allow guests to use personal reusable cups again.
The popular coffee chain announced in a press release that company-operated stores in the United States would be “safely reintroducing personal reusable cups” on June 22.
Starbucks suspended the usage of personal cups in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company created a contactless cup-refill method to eliminate any shared touch points between customers and baristas.
“Bringing back personal reusable cups is key part of Starbucks’ ongoing commitment to reduce single-use cup waste and goal to reduce waste by 50% by 2030,” the company said.
There are over 250 Starbucks locations in New Jersey.
I get it that Starbucks is trying to reduce its waste footprint. To its credit, it doesn’t rely on the recycling fairy to solve its waste problem – perhaps because, disposable coffee cups are particularly difficult to recycle, as this 2018 Treehugger story discusses, Starbucks Cups Are Not Recyclable, Which Means 4 Billion Go to Landfill Each Year. A billion each year. That’s a lot of coffee cups.
Regulatory Aid
What the company needs at this stage is some regulatory assistance to buttress – or kick start – depending on how you look at it, its shift to reusable cups. An effective program might include a combination of large surcharges on disposable cups, a larger discount for people who bring their own, and an in-store reusable cups program. Notice that I mentioned above that South Korea would be the first place where the company will eliminate disposable cups completely.
Why is that? Because Starbucks has no choice. South Korea’s regulators appear serious about reducing the country’s plastic waste by 20% by 2025, according to Treehugger, Starbucks Will Eliminate Disposable Cups in South Korea by 2025:
Starbucks South Korea announced this week that it will eliminate all single-use disposable cups by 2025. Instead, beverages will be served in reusable cups, with customers paying a small deposit that is refunded when they return the cup using a contactless, automated in-store kiosk.
The new business model will launch this summer in select stores in Jeju, an island to the south of the mainland, and then roll out in additional stores across the country over the next four years. A company statement says, “This program helps Starbucks shift from single use to reusable packaging, bringing the company one step closer to its global goal of cutting its landfill waste in half by 2030.“[Jerri-Lynn here: citation omitted.]
The move is surely linked to South Korea’s own changes in environmental policies. In 2018, the use of disposable cups for dine-in customers was banned. Legislation introduced last year, according to The New York Times, “would require fast food and coffee chains to charge refundable deposits for disposable cups to encourage returns and recycling.”
That’s a clever strategy to get customers thinking about the environmental repercussions of using disposables and hold them accountable in some way. South Korea’s environment ministry said it wants to reduce the country’s plastic waste by one-fifth by 2025.
….
Once national policies become hostile to disposability, companies are forced to come up with new ways of conducting business, and they usually innovate very quickly. If Starbucks can do this in one country, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be replicated elsewhere. [Jerri-Lynn here: My emphasis.]
In the absence of such regulatory assistance, the tougher its waste policy, the more Starbucks risks the possibility that consumers may find it easier to buy their coffee for a shop that doesn’t have such tough policies. According to another Treehugger account, Starbucks Introduces Reusable Cup Program in Europe, Middle East, Africa:
It would be nice to see additional measures put in place to encourage people to use their own, however. Thirty uses isn’t all that many for a reusable cup—only a month’s worth of daily coffees. Most people own insulated cups that they’ve used far more times than that, which is why an incentive that greatly discounts bringing one’s own should be a top priority for the company—something like 1 Euro or more. This could be offset by greatly increasing the surcharge for disposables to act as a true deterrent. If that is too complicated, a basic sign above the cash that says “We’d love to fill your reusable cup” might go a long way toward building customer participation.
A sign? Is that a serious suggestion?
What would be much more effective in reducing waste would be for regulators to ban disposable coffee cups entirely. Or, to levy a large surcharge – say five dollars, five euros, or five pounds, as appropriate – on disposable cups, with the proceeds directed to waste clean-up initiatives. You could still get a disposable cup if you insisted – you would just need to pay more for that dubious pleasure. Far more likely for most consumers than ponying up that fiver is that they would soon remember to bring their own, or alternatively – and even more likely – that Starbucks would quickly roll out the reusable cups initiatives that it’s planning for EMEA countries and South Korea worldwide, or at least wherever regulators had the fortitude to adopt tough restrictions on disposable cups.
We have bottle deposit laws, and those encourage people to return bottles for recycling (and not just the people who purchased the bottles in the first instance).
For coffee cups, recycling’s not a viable option. At least not for the disposable currently in use. So regulators need either to ban the disposable cups entirely, or levy a high enough surcharge so that people – and the company – turn to other options.
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I’ve had the Starbucks in my local Safeway grocery store fill my travel mug for a few years without issue. Just ask, you might be surprised at how accommodating and nice some stores and people are.
“Tested to last up to 30 times” is not the same as “Will be used 15 – 30 times”.
SB could be greenwashing and not reuse the containers at all….
Why am I seeing this nauseous advert’ for this horrible evangelical bigoted governor of Georgia ?
We have “remnant” ads, which are Google-type ads places on space sold on ad exchanges. They are targeted based on reader location and other relevant data. Do you live in the South and look at political sites? By contrast, I am getting discounted women’s fashion and outdoor socks.
Consider ads like this as a form of unintended penance. They are paying in a teeny way for content that is hostile to their message.
Until nordstream 2 was approved, my clickbait at the top said “Russians are killing Germans!” Now it shows hipster coffee machines. Not sure what caused that…
As a matter of interest, does NC benefit if we click on the ad?
No Starbucks in Western Australia, but most single use plastics, including coffee cups / lids, banned by end-2022.
https://www.wa.gov.au/service/environment/business-and-community-assistance/western-australias-plan-plastics
No downside to giving it a start in the U.S.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/pepsis-biodegradable-backlash-snack-bag-was-too-noisy
I’m old enough to remember when Sun Chips implemented a biodegradable bag that consumers bitched and moaned about until they got rid of it.
There’s a more basic waste management issue with disposable cups: the volume of roadside waste. I live in Massachusetts, which has a (woefully incomplete) bottle law, and one of the biggest sources of litter is beverage containers that don’t have deposits, such as restaurant cups, water bottles, and nips. I’d like to see policies that get this trash off roadsides and parks even if it means the cups end up in landfills rather than recycled.
Sounds like a great way to sell coffee mugs … but a “reusable” cup with 30 re-uses? Is that really the best they can do. They are leaving money on the table. They could have designed a truly beautiful, relatively light weight, reusable, and widely desired coffee mug. But no.
Art is very important to Humankind, but artists are so little and so poorly supported. Excellent design, excellent art sells for a song. Perhaps some starving artists might make reusable cups that are hard-to-break, light weight, and beautiful. They could probably design them with covers like Chinese tea cups and a hold-down system. Etsy with Starbucks tie-in using the Starbucks ads to leverage an in to making sales?
I don’t know, I could be wrong, but this will probably save them money. Doubtful it will cost them anything, people are lazy about getting the deposit back and Starbucks keeps all that coin.
There may be regulations driving this in other countries, but there won’t be any Regulation here. I am always suspicious of Corp. motives.
I think that I will just stay home and make my own drinks.
Agreed.
How hard is home brew coffee?
It’s not.
It’s often about seeing and being seen.
French press for me
In my neck of the woods I have 2 choices of local roaster for organic beans with no price penalty from the big shots 11.99/lb and I can bag my own, although my current favorite does come in vacuum sealed bags if I buy it at their shop at march’s point
Do I have to re-registrar my screen name?
To me, the worst thing about Starbucks cups is the plastic lid. They don’t recycle them. They aren’t biodegradable. Just more fast food lids to pollute the land and water forever.
The worst thing about Starbucks cups is the terrible coffee inside.
This is the real comment right here.
From Spain: Can you just change your habits to a more Mediterranean way of drinking coffee? Take 5 minutes to sip a glass or pottery cup on premise and return it to be washed. This “grab your cup of coffee and drink as you walk because you are always in a hurry” thing is wrong in so many ways. Or worse: drinking coffee as you drive. Such a crazy business model: you queue to get a plastic/paper oversized cup of coffee, 3 times more expensive than your old school coffee and then you have to leave the place to drink it because all the tables are occupied with people with laptops who should go to the local library instead of a place like this.
Yup. I don’t really understand takeaway coffee as I don’t enjoy drinking while walking or driving or, for that matter, cycling. If I have a long drive I make a flask of coffee – its cheaper, and its made exactly the way I like it (Starbucks in particular is horrible, it has a burnt flavour and somehow seems to sneak sweetener into everything). For me the whole point of a coffee is to have a little break in the day and a freshener, and that means sitting for a few minutes to enjoy it, either at home or sitting in a cafe.
Its not even a case of not being busy, I find a quiet cafe a good place to do some work if I need a change of scenary during the day (well, I did pre-Covid).
Charbucks?
Yeah, the sweetener smell wafts through the whole place. It’s really insidious, like HFCS with some added ‘nilla goo.
Starbucks blows chunks
I don’t know how they will implement this in Germany. Every time I bring the cup/mug used for the first order for a second espresso or coffee, they refuse this, saying that health inspector and health and safety regulations forbid this.
Maybe this is the very plan: a PR-idea being stopped on the ground so that it cannot be executed.
I remember being at some food festival in Vienna, where you paid a two euro deposit on your china cup. When you were done with it, you could return it for your deposit, or you could just keep the cup. Not exactly a drive-in window solution, I know. As an aside: The busiest place in town in the midst of the pandemic–even more than the usual burger franchises–was a brand-new Starbucks. You could get a coffee or even lunch without going inside or touching anybody.
https://amp.reddit.com/r/Whataburger/comments/8wl3y8/after_years_of_searching_i_finally_found_one_at_a/
It’s amazing how tepid this initiative is and how long the timetable. Five years are needed to stop using disposable coffee cups? Especially after a decade or more where it was obvious this was coming?
There was a time when five years was long enough to win a world war, or half the time needed for a lunar landing.
I’d suggest the radical anticonsumerist stance of requiring people to supply their own cups. Oh look Ma, I got this here U.S. Army Surplus coffee cup and it will outlive me. What a daring concept …
The very femtosecond you complain of hassle, you have become part of the resistance to solving the problem. That’s right: “my personal convenience outweighs the survival of the only known sentient species within 13.72 billion lightyears” indeed. Oh look, I have to wash my own cup! I have to carry it around, etc. — and I remember the working people of, say, the 1950s and 1960s, who carried that burden transparently.
I’m ok with this as long as all the waste in the developed countries stays there
Where I work, all of the cafeterias are old enough that the facilities for using, washings, storing, and handling cups, plates, silverware still remain.
Why isn’t it being used? The managers wanted to get rid of the workers.
And there you are – throw away coffee cups came about so that we could throw away the workers too.
Huh? The whole point of Starbucks is that it’s disposable. I have a very hard time seeing New Yorkers carrying about used semi disposable cups all over town. Sounds like they are just gonna start charging for cups.