More than anything, a diminished sense of efficacy and declining faith in local democracy fueled Jeffrey’s shifting civil rights tactics. The minister’s call for a Starbucks boycott suggests a more far-reaching rearrangement in power—one that commentators concerned with the rise of neoliberalism, from Benjamin Barber to David Harvey to Naomi Klein, have noted. “We must confront” corporations, Klein urged in her book and call to arms, No Logo, in 2002, “because that is where the power is.” In the actions of Jeffrey and, even more, the legions of twenty-something media-savvy antiglobalization protesters, Klein heard the ramblings of a new political surge that called multinational brands and corporations to task, often playfully reworking their logos and messages into potent anti-market, pro-producer, pro-civic society protest symbols.
But the movement she imagined either has quieted down or is still gaining momentum somewhere on the fringes. While it runs its course, something else is happening. In some ways, it is the opposite of what Klein had hoped would happen. In many cases, though not all, the brands have taken political dissent and the broader desire for change, and folded these impulses right back into more consumption.5
In this neoliberal moment, politics and government seem to many almost irrelevant, and elected leaders seem incapable or unwilling to make serious change. Sensing this perception and acknowledging the free-flowing power of capital, protesters like Jeffrey decided to focus on the corporations rather than governments to get things done. Less engaged citizens started to feel this way, too. Like Jeffrey, they genuinely want solutions to big, complex problems like global warming. But if government no longer seems as relevant or powerful, where can they turn? (Again, Obama may, perhaps, prompt new questions and new answers. Perhaps.)
Brands like Starbucks have stepped in to fill the void. They promise to solve the problems their customers want solved. Unlike protest movements, like the one Jeffrey tried to start, the companies don’t ask patrons to give up anything or do the hard work of education or organization. All change-seeking customers need to do is buy, and the corporations will handle the rest. While Starbucks didn’t do anything for Jeffrey (company representatives didn’t even meet with him—perhaps he didn’t represent a big enough market share or maybe meeting his demands would set a dangerous precedent and align the company with the wrong group), it did promise to answer Al Gore’s more popular challenge to make the world greener. Actually, it had been doing that for a long time, even before earth-first thinking got hip.
On this front and others, Starbucks not only promised to do what governments used to do but also started to act like a government. In 1990, the company issued a mission statement that, like a constitution, laid out its “guiding principles.” Number five (out of ten, a number invoking, of course, the Bill of Rights) pledges that Starbucks will “contribute positively to our communities and our environment.” “Help us help the planet,” it reiterates on every cup and every java jacket. With this promise, Starbucks vowed to fulfill its customers’ green desires, the same ones detected by the Cone consumer survey. Yet all too often its promises have turned out more hollow than whole. Still, for many the promises are enough. They get their coffee to go just like they want it, and they get to think of themselves as part of the solution, not the problem. What they really get, and what Starbucks really sells, is not so much answers but a washing of the hands, what I would call innocence by association.
STARBUCKS’ FOOTPRINT
A cartoon a few years ago pictured a man in a suit in line at an upscale coffee shop. He looks back at the woman behind him and scoffs, “I’m too busy to make my own coffee.”6 Apparently so are a lot of us these days, or at least we want to look like we are too busy to make our own coffee, and we carry these attitudes and their impact on us out the door in paper cups.
All buying decisions—ours and those of the companies we buy from—are environmental decisions. Everything we purchase comes from somewhere and ends up somewhere. It takes energy to get the goods to the store and to get rid of what’s left when we are done. What we do on both ends leaves a mark on the environment.
Starbucks promises that buying its coffee represents a good decision for us and for the planet. The company claims that we can have it all— convenience and a limited environmental impact; business as usual and an end to global warming; getting what we want, how we want it, and showing that we care. But can we really have it all with no costs some-where for someone?
Over the last decade, coffeehouses—led by Starbucks—have sprung up everywhere. We aren’t, however, drinking appreciably more coffee. According to industry surveys, overall coffee consumption in the United States has increased, but only slightly over the last twenty years and mostly among younger consumers. Yet we do drink more espresso-based drinks (the kind that require expensive equipment and training to make and are best consumed at a coffee shop) and more specialty, high-end coffee (coffee that takes skill to procure and make correctly).7 Clearly, the coffee trend is part of several larger, more generalized trends toward the selling of affordable expertise, luxury, and status making and the explosive expansion of takeaway food culture. With more people working and commuting, we are busier than ever, and we drink more coffee outside the home, on the run. This is the growth sector of the business. Since 1990, as a result, retail coffee beverage sales have tripled, from $30 billion to $90 billion each year.8
In the United States, most of this coffee comes in to-go cups. Between 60 to 80 percent of Starbucks customers, more in the cities than the suburbs, and more in the mornings than in the afternoons, grab and go. That means our desire for coffee generates lots of waste: millions of pounds in paper and plastic cups, plastic lids, napkins, sugar packets, and stirrers. That’s just the beginning of the trash—the beginning of the environmental footprint that our collective desire for high-end, take-away coffee leaves behind.
• • •
To find out more about Starbucks and its trash, I called Elizabeth Royte, an investigative journalist who works her own environmental beat. In 2000, Royte tracked her trash as part of a clever and perceptive book, Garbage Land.9 She tagged along—literally—behind a Fig Newton wrapper and a discarded computer. The trips took her to dark lagoons off Queens, sanitation stations in Staten Island, and bleak landfills in eastern Pennsylvania.
How could I measure Starbucks’ environmental imprint, I asked Royte over the phone. I knew from books I had read that intensive, corporateled coffee cultivation stripped away shade trees, endangered wildlife, and contaminated the water supply with the runoff from chemical fertilizers. But I wanted to know more about the costs of consuming Starbucks in the United States. What did our desires for lattes take from others?
“Start with water,” Royte said.
Coffee, she pointed out, is made up mostly of water. So Starbucks uses prodigious amounts of water. But it is not just water to make coffee. It’s also water to clean spatulas, knives, espresso machines, floors, coffee filter holders, windows, and toilets. After making Frappuccinos, the baristas have to wash out the blenders. Each Starbucks, at least in England, I learned after talking to Royte, has a cold tap that runs into a sink, known as a “dipper well.” It is used to wash utensils. According to the Guardian newspaper, under company guidelines, management won’t allow staff to turn the water off, ever, because it claims that a constant flow of water prevents germs and other bacteria from breeding. Green activists say that this policy wastes enough water to fill an Olympic-size pool every eighty-three minutes and to take care of two million people in drought-starved Namibia for a year.10 At the same time, Starbucks uses literally tons of paper, which in turn, requires lots of water. According to industry reports, it takes three thousand gallons of water to make ten thousand sixteen-ounce paper coffee cups. With its forty-four to fifty million weekly customers, that means Starbucks consumes around ten thousand gallons of water an hour to provide cups for its to-go customers.
The paper cups themselves are just the beginning of the paper trail.
Coffeehouse customers use napkins, toilet paper, paper towels, small bags, stirrers, trays for carrying more than one drink, and plates for pastries, cheese and crackers, and lunches. Behind the counter, as Royte explained, there were more paper products. The cups, for instance, arrive in cardboard boxes with thick cardboard separators. Because Starbucks relies on so few local products or vendors, everything comes in boxes. All the paper products plus the bags of coffee, boxes of tea, bottles of vanilla and hazelnut syrup, CDs, books, muffins, bagels, biscotti, and breath mints all come in boxes, often with dividers. Using all of these paper products for our coffee translates into lots of water use. It also leaves behind lots of hard-to-deal-with paper-based trash.
Starbucks and its customers don’t use just paper; they consume sheets and sheets of plastic, too. All drinks come with plastic lids, and employees serve all of the cold drinks in clear plastic cups. Before they get to the stores, the lids and cups get wrapped in another coat of protective plastic, which comes, by the way, in cardboard boxes with cardboard dividers. Same with the filters for the coffee—they also come in boxes separated by dividers and wrapped in plastic. The CDs come wrapped in plastic. The milk jugs—and each store must go through thousands of them each year— are nothing but plastic. “Plastic,” Royte made clear, “isn’t easy to get rid of.” It doesn’t decompose; it just sits in the landfill if it isn’t recycled.
Plastics raised not just the issue of disposal but also the issue of oil: all plastic products come from oil—specifically, petroleum. Starbucks’ dependence on plastics for its liners, wrappers, milk jugs, lids, and cold drink cups links the company, and us as its consumers, not just to piles of trash and loads of pollutants but also to vexing global politics stretching from Iraq to Israel to Russia to Venezuela and back to the United States.
In 2005, traffic engineers from the nation’s capital pointed out to a Washington Post reporter an emerging “Starbucks effect.” Many latte drinkers, they noted, drove out of their way each morning to get their fix, probably in takeaway cups. That mileage quickly adds up. Think about it: if you drive four or five miles every day for a Starbucks drink, you would need to buy an additional seventy to one hundred gallons of gas per year per car, even more for SUVs and trucks. All of the additional driving also produced noticeable spikes in highway congestion and air pollution and further entangled the nation in the knotty global politics of oil.11
Royte told me that around the same time that the Post report came out, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey found persistent and elevated traces of caffeine—another form of trash—in the nation’s waterways.
“How did it get there?” I asked.
“When we drink coffee,” Royte chuckled, “we pee, and that goes into the water supply.”
As we finished talking, she gave me clear instructions for the next phase of my research: “You’ve got to get the trash. See what’s there.”
This is easier said than done. I used to talk with Ben, the manager of the Starbucks outlet on Temple University’s main campus, fairly often. But I just couldn’t get up the nerve to ask him for his store’s trash. I knew he might say yes, and then he would have to ask a district manager or some other higher-up. Then the questions would start, and six months later, someone in Seattle would say no. That is, in fact, what happened, except I kept Ben out of it. I made an official request to a Starbucks representative to comb through a few of the company’s bags of trash. “You asked if you could spend time going through the trash at one of our stores,” Audrey Lincoff, then vice president of global brand communications, explained to me in an e-mail. “It would be disruptive to the store’s operation to execute what you’re asking.”12 After this rebuff, I tried to contact a store manger I knew and had interviewed a couple of times, hoping he might give me some trash to look at on the sly, but he had taken another job by that time. I started stealing long peeks in store trash cans, noting what I saw, but this wasn’t the same as getting the bags, as Royte reminded me in a subsequent e-mail. “You need to get the trash and go through it!” she wrote.
Then one night, I was driving our minivan and I passed a Starbucks. There they were—four bulging black bags sitting on the sidewalk. I drove around the block again and looked, and then I drove around again and looked again. If someone had been watching, they would have thought I was casing the joint. I was, sort of. On the third go round, I stopped in front of the Starbucks. I looked around again. When the coast was clear, I opened the van door and walked slowly over to the bags, not wanting to call attention to myself. One more look around. No one seemed to be looking. I grabbed a bag, threw it into the back of the Sienna, and dashed off.
The next morning I opened the trash bag. It held a lot of what you would expect a Starbucks trash bag to hold. A thin coat of coffee and cream from people pouring off the excess from their drinks and throwing away what they couldn’t finish covered everything: lids, wooden stirrers, java jackets, brown napkins and pastry bags, thick cardboard to-go trays, plastic knives and forks, straws and straw wrappers, and sugar and Splenda packets. Stuck to these things were half-eaten apples, chewed-on cheese squares, Caesar salad croutons, and discarded chunks of cranberry scone. Mixed in were single-serving butter and cream cheese packets. There were a few empty soda cans and Ethos Water bottles. There was plastic wrap from CDs and shortbread cookies, and a few chocolate milk boxes and balled-up sheets of wax paper. The bag also contained a crushed milk jug and several strips of cardboard. There were copies of the Metro, New York Times, City Paper, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, and even a week-old crumpled-up local section from the Des Moines Register. Someone had thrown away junk mail and a page from a daily planner. I uncovered a box for a new iPod and a blue Gap bag and a few other plastic bags from the grocery store. Some loose change had settled to the bottom—a handful of pennies, a nickel, and two dimes. But mostly there were cups—lots of plastic cups and even more paper cups with promises about saving the planet on each and every one of them.
THE PAPER CUPS
When I first discovered Starbucks in Southern California in 1993, employees automatically used two paper cups for serving the hot coffee. That way you could drink it without singeing your hand. Other places in those days gave you hot joe in white Styrofoam cups. While these containers didn’t burn your fingers, they seemed so artificial that they made the coffee inside seem just as fake. At the diner or at the corner grocery, they gave you coffee in a single paper cup topped by a flat plastic lid with, if you were lucky, a napkin wrapped around the outside. After you cut a hole in the top and took a few sips from the jagged spout, the napkin got wet and started to fall apart. When you peeled the bits of paper off, the cup was still hot and you were back to square one: either you burnt your hand, or you had to get another napkin (more wasted paper). At first, then, the Starbucks double cup seemed like a great leap forward.
I thought that until I ran into a friend of mine who ran a landfill outside a small town. He was the first person I knew who recycled, and this was long before any of us had heard of curbside pickup or sorting the plastic from the glass. “What’s with Starbucks?” he said to me after I had just finished singing the company’s praises. “Why are they so special that they get two cups for every customer?”13
Starbucks officials must have also heard this question. Or maybe it was the bottom-line people who responded first, looking for a way to cut costs and eliminate one of the paper cups. Wherever the impetus came from, in August 1996, Starbucks and the Alliance for Environmental Innovation—a branch of Environmental Defense, a group that helps companies, including Wal-Mart in recent years, “do well by doing good”—entered into a partnership to, in the words of both groups, “reduce the environmental impacts of serving coffee in Starbucks retail stores.” From the start, they had a broad focus with one eye always on the paper cups.
By 1997, Starbucks replaced the second cup with a three-finger-wide insulated layer—a java jacket. Obviously, the sleeves saved
paper. Pretty soon, Starbucks salvaged even more paper—and more trees, water, and fuel—when it introduced jackets made out of 60 percent post–consumer use material—that is, paper made from discarded office paper, newspapers, cereal boxes, and other recycled materials. The company clearly felt good about this move, and it wanted latte drinkers to feel the same. “Starbucks,” it proclaims on every one of these sleeves, “is committed to reducing our environmental impact through increased use of post-consumer materials. Help us help the planet.”
Over the years, Starbucks has taken a number of other constructive steps to aid the planet. Each year, it donates money to the Earth Day Foundation to raise environmental awareness and improve environmental education. Around 2000 or so, it began to purchase significant amounts of alternative and wind-generated clean energy. It has also looked for ways to cut the use of electricity and trim carbon outputs from its stores. At the same time, it has established the Grounds for Coffee program. Many stores give away bags of used coffee grounds. This keeps them from weighing down trash bags and garbage trucks (again requiring more gasoline) and filling up landfills. The grounds also provide gardeners with effective compost that, in turn, helps naturally replenish soil. Following concerted research efforts, Starbucks reduced the size of its napkins and the thickness of its plastic bags. Together these innovations have allowed Starbucks, according to one report, “to prevent 1.8 million pounds of waste” each year from ending up in landfills. Company representatives also urged coffee growers to use fewer pesticides and more shade trees to protect the water supply and wildlife in the world’s developing regions.
Everything but the Coffee Page 21
