Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Like a lot of companies, Starbucks ramped up its green actions in 2007, after Al Gore garnered his Oscar for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The company launched the “Be Green This Summer” campaign. As part of this, it initiated “Green Umbrellas for a Green Cause.” Hollywood celebrities America Ferrera, Chad Lowe, Lance Bass, Lawrence Bender, and Jo Frost, “who,” according to a Starbucks press release, “shared Starbucks’ passion for the environment,” transformed the company’s trademark green umbrellas into “original works of art.” Afterward, they were auctioned off, with the proceeds going to Global Green USA, “a national leader in advocating for smart solutions to global warming.” During Be Green This Summer, Starbucks also introduced the online “Planet Green Game,” to teach players how to lessen their environmental imprint and trim greenhouse gas emissions. It followed this up by heavily promoting the “climate control film” Arctic Tale. Starbucks used this story of cuddly walruses and baby polar bears to, in its words, “inspire people to change the world” by caring more for the environment. 14

  Despite the green games, films, and works of art, the paper cups kept leaving a deep environmental footprint. They consumed tremendous amounts of energy, fuel, and large patches of landfill space and raised questions about just how much Starbucks wanted to help the planet. This is not to say the company did nothing. It just promised a lot.

  LOOKING FOR A BETTER CUP

  Beginning in 1996, Starbucks and its partner Alliance for Environmental Innovation started looking at ways to develop a more eco-friendly cup. The search took ten years. The problem, as Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president for environmental affairs, claimed, was that “recycled content had never before been used in direct contact with food, especially steaming hot beverages.” After ten years, the Food and Drug Administration did approve a Starbucks cup made with 10 percent post–consumer use material.

  In March 2006, Starbucks rolled out the new white containers with a flurry of green fanfare. These “first ever” cups, the company announced, underscoring its self-proclaimed willingness to sacrifice profit for the greater environmental good, cost a little more, but they were worth it. Along with the sleeves, the containers would help Starbucks help us to save the planet. More sober, yet still celebratory, reports from the Alliance for Environmental Innovation pointed out that Starbucks used 1.9 billion (now 2.2 billion) cups per year. As a result of Starbucks’ use of recycled materials, the Alliance estimated that in 2006, the coffee company saved 78,000 trees, enough energy to supply 640 homes with electricity for an entire year, enough water to fill 71 Olympic-size swimming pools, and enough trash to fully load 109 garbage trucks.15

  Despite these impressive numbers, the Starbucks cups still raised the proverbial question about whether the big cup—in this case, the green cup—was half full or half empty. When I told Elizabeth Royte about the cups containing 10 percent recycled material, she responded, “That isn’t much.” Then she asked, “Why didn’t they do this sooner?” Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist for the National Resources Defense Council, told a reporter, “It’s a helpful start, but 10 percent recycled content is minuscule.”16 When I asked him over e-mail what would be a “more acceptable number,” he answered, “at least 30% pcw.” (PCW stands for post–consumer waste.) Ben Packard of Starbucks shook his head when I repeated to him what Royte and Hershkowitz had said. Cups with any more recycled material, he said, would fall apart, although one green-friendly paper company does feature a hot cup with 12 percent PCW. The same firm also offers a corn-based fully biodegradable and compostable cup. Beginning in 2007, a number of independent coffee shops around the country started to use these “ecotainers,” but they aren’t everyone’s preferred option.17 Some worry that the cups emit a subtle odor that gets in the coffee. (The manufacturers dispute this point, but unlike Starbucks, they don’t have the marketing power to make their case to the widest audience.) Others point to the price. Paper cups with a top and a jacket typically cost between twelve to twenty-two cents each. Compostable containers can cost twice as much. So Starbucks clearly is willing to pay more for its cups, but not a whole lot more.18

  According to Steve Baker, owner of the GreenLine Paper Company in York, Pennsylvania, when it comes to developing better compostable cups or ones made from a higher percentage of post–consumer waste, the problem isn’t science. It’s economics. The big paper companies, he thinks, have too much invested in the production of virgin white paper. Switching to more eco-friendly options would cost them in terms of infrastructure—kind of like Detroit and its deep and fatal attachment to oversized gasoline-powered engines—so they have stalled on the research and manufacturing of viable alternatives to virgin white paper. In several cases, Baker explained, they have bought up small companies producing alternative cups and buried them within their corporate structures. In other situations, they use greenish options as shields to deflect criticism. When an environmentally friendly reporter calls on the phone, they point to their green subsidiaries and invoke their own innocence by association. “Look,” they say, “we are part of the solution, not the problem.” Then when the investigators go away, Baker asserted, they go back to business as usual.

  • • •

  New kinds of disposable cups are not, however, the only answer to the problem of waste and coffee consumption. On its Web site, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) charts the sharp decline in landfill space across the country over the last decade. But the waste keeps coming. Thirty-four percent of the garbage dumped into the nation’s landfills comes from paper—more than any other single source. At the landfill, paper fills up holes in the ground, slowly decomposing, some-times leaking chemicals from print dyes into the soil. Paper presents additional environmental problems on the production side, creating more waste and pollution. Making paper—virgin white paper and even paper with some post–consumer use materials—requires, of course, copious amounts of water and energy, and that means triggering a cycle that means using more fossil fuels and generating more greenhouse gas emissions. Gasoline is needed to run the machines to plant the trees, cut them down, and get them to the paper mill. Natural gas may be used to power the machines to melt the trees into pulp. Then more gasoline is needed to transport the boxes of cups encased in plastic and separated by cardboard dividers to the stores and haul the paper-filled trash bags back to landfills and incinerators.

  To tackle the landfill and general waste problems, EPA officials recommend reusing, as much as possible, existing materials. For coffee shops, this means offering washable mugs for in-store customers and filling up tumblers and thermoses for the takeaway people (at a discount, if possible). Just about everyone, except perhaps a few paper company executives, agrees that the environmental and fuel costs of hand washing or running a dishwasher to clean reusable cups are easily offset by the savings, both in terms of costs to the coffeehouse owner and benefits to the environment. According to one report, researchers found that compared to paper, ceramic mugs produced “an 86-percent drop in emissions of airborne particulates and a 29-percent decrease in greenhouse gases.”19 Using glass instead of plastic, which, as mentioned, is particularly hard to get rid of, for cold drinks generates even greater green savings. “Glass use,” write the editors of Environmental Packaging, “meant a 99.7 percent cut in emissions of volatile organic compounds and a 99-percent decrease in nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide emissions.” Starbucks’ own research confirmed these findings. In a report written in conjunction with its partner the Alliance for Environmental Innovation, the company strongly endorsed the use of reusable cups, saying that replacing disposable plastic cups with glass would reduce energy use by 98 percent. Using reusable ceramic for hot drinks, the same report concludes, could reduce water usage by 64 percent and cut solid waste by 86 percent. Based on the evidence, Starbucks and everyone else agreed that reusable cups are good for the environment. Starbucks—on its Web page, in its corporate social responsibility report, and when company officials
sit down with journalists—restates this point, saying that the firm endorses the use of reusables. On the ground, however, things aren’t so clear.20

  During the 2006–2007 holiday season, I conducted my own Starbucks’ environmental impact study to learn about the company’s efforts to save the planet. For a month beginning in early December, I went to twenty-seven Starbucks stores in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. (My wife, Ann Marie, and our favorite person, Libby McRae, helped out with the research.) Not once in forty-three Starbucks visits did a barista ask us if we wanted our coffee for here or to go. Not once did someone offer us a ceramic cup. Instead, they automatically put our drinks into brand-new, 90 percent virgin white paper cups. When we asked if they had ceramic cups, they often looked surprised and said haltingly yes—except at one store where an employee said he didn’t have anything other than paper. (That response was against company policy.) But no store showed off the in-store option—and Starbucks does indeed have nice, hefty ceramic cups. As an added bonus, coffee aficionados maintain that coffee tastes better in reusable mugs. But typically I couldn’t even see these cups at Starbucks. If I hadn’t poked around the company’s Web site or read a few reports, I would never have known that it offered the reusable option. Usually I had to get on my toes and peer over the glass covering the espresso machine to see the ceramic mugs.

  At a downtown Philadelphia outlet, a barista gave me a funny look when I asked him for my tall coffee in a “for here” cup.

  “Do you have ceramic cups?”

  “Huh? I don’t know,” he answered. “Let me ask.”

  Then he wandered off and whispered to his coworkers. They looked back at me. After he spoke to a couple more people in green aprons, he went into the back of the store and came out carrying a ceramic espresso cup.

  “Will this work?” he asked, holding up the tiny mug.

  Before I could answer, one of his coworkers shouted, “I found it!” and came running out with a full-sized reusable cup.

  Over the course of my December experiment, I counted about 520 people sitting in the Starbucks stores I visited. Only three drank their coffee out of an EPA-and coffee-connoisseur-recommended reusable cup—a sensible and certain way for consumers to show their everyday commitment to help save the planet.

  Just to make sure that it wasn’t just people from Philly or New York or Jersey who liked paper cups, I conducted abbreviated versions of my experiment after the holidays in Atlanta and Seattle. At a jampacked downtown Atlanta store, I sat for an hour as a stream of customers came and went. Most got their coffee to go, all in paper cups. Some sat down to eat a muffin or scan spreadsheets on their computers. A few held meetings. Several read the paper, and a few more talked on their cell phones. (Not much third place action going on here.) Not one patron drank a Starbucks beverage out of a reusable cup. A few weeks later on a bright, crisp Tuesday morning in Seattle, I watched as a ceaseless flow of customers passed through a Starbucks located on the bottom floor of a glass office building across the street from the federal courthouse. In one hectic early-morning hour, the baristas there served 224 customers. None of them—not one—used a reusable cup. One woman even carried a mug with her into the store and then set it down on a table and got her latte in a paper cup. Most of these customers could easily have used the more eco-friendly option. Despite the cold bite in the air, at least half of the people in line weren’t wearing coats, so they probably worked on one of the many floors above the store. How hard would it have been for them to bring a mug down from their cubicle? If only two customers that hour and every other hour during the day had used their own cups, this Starbucks could have saved over the course of a single year 1,631 gallons of water and reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 226 pounds and its solid waste output by 252 pounds.21

  I got these numbers from Starbucks. But this information about the positive environmental impact of reusable cups wasn’t available in the stores. Instead, it is buried on the company’s Web page. That’s not because Starbucks has suddenly become a shy and demure company, reluctant to talk about its efforts to save the planet. A couple of times a year, it takes out full-page advertisements in the front section of the New York Times to celebrate Earth Day and explain its other green initiatives.22 Company representatives tell reporters about the firm’s use of clean energy and boast about its to-go cups made with recycled material—things that Starbucks did and developed on its own. Sometimes, it seems like the company only wants to discuss the things that it can claim credit for. Starbucks doesn’t have all that much to say about what consumers themselves can do for the planet—except through buying a cup of coffee from Starbucks, an environmentally conscious company. What’s more, Starbucks doesn’t put out any obvious or even subliminal messages or even talk to reporters about the ceramic cups or takeaway options, again the surest ways of getting their customers involved in saving the planet and dealing with the daily problems and politics of waste. Judging from the responses I got when I asked for an in-store cup, it didn’t even seem like it let its workers in on the program. Several employees I talked with told me that this was never part of their training. One former employee, in fact, said that when he worked for the company, “we were expressly told by our SM [store manager] . . . to not encourage the use of cups, and to keep them out of the visual line of sight for the customers coming in to order.”23

  Maybe Starbucks didn’t want to get rid of the paper cups after all. Perhaps it didn’t want to pay dishwashers or give up store space for machines and sinks, although it is hard to imagine that a few broken cups or water for cleaning could cost more than the actual paper cups them-selves, which again cost anywhere from twelve to twenty-two cents apiece. Or maybe Starbucks didn’t want to give up the paper cups because they are, in the end, a major source of advertising. All those businesspeople in suits, Hollywood starlets, and college students carrying the cups in their hands broadcast the brand’s value better than any television spot could do. The same could be said about the packaging for the pounds of coffee for sale at Starbucks. These, too, are a key form of in-store and at-home advertising, and the sacks are not recyclable like the ones available at a number of smaller, greener roasters. Just like with the cups, maybe Starbucks didn’t want to give up the discovery-themed graphics on the pounds of coffee in favor of helping the planet.

  A HALF-EMPTY CUP

  Before I started thinking about trash and coffee consumption, I always got my coffee in a to-go cup. When friends would ask me why, I would say I liked the taste better. Even when I had my laptop and planned to stay in a coffee shop for hours working on an article or grading papers, I took the paper route. Despite what I said, this choice didn’t have much to do with taste. I liked the flexibility. What if I had to rush out? I would still have my coffee. Like a lot of people, I didn’t want to limit my options. Isn’t that what the world of endless consumption teaches us?24

  After reading Elizabeth Royte’s book on trash and the EPA reports, I decided to lessen my own environmental impact.25 I started to recycle more, buy fewer single-serving items like the individual containers of applesauce I got for my kids’ lunches, and bring my own bags to the grocery store. But probably the most important step I took was to start drinking my coffee out of reusable cups. So did my wife. Together, we probably buy four cups of coffee a day, which translates—again according to Starbucks’ numbers—into about 250 pounds of solid waste that we generated each year through our to-go coffee purchases. By using in-store and out-of-store reusable cups, we are keeping trash out of the landfill. We are also, in a very small way, stopping the cycle of waste and paper consumption—using paper and then getting rid of the paper— which requires energy at every stage. With each purchase, the process starts over: that is the cycle of waste.

  After I changed how I bought my coffee, I must admit I felt kind of good about myself. I gained a satisfying sense of doing something unselfish for the environment. Walking down the street, I carried my reusable cup as a badge of h
onor. This easy sense of doing right did make me feel good and did, perhaps, get in the way of my engaging in a broader critique of consumption and the creation of waste. I didn’t take another step; for example, I didn’t start attending meetings of environmental action groups or writing op-ed pieces. I had done my part. That said, this wasn’t something I could easily have done at Starbucks.

  In contrast, at the Other Greenline, an independent coffee shop near my house, the staff there makes my small eco-friendly gestures easy to accomplish. The reusable cups sit on a shelf right behind the cash register at eye level in clear view. At Joe Coffee Bar, a downtown Philadelphia coffeehouse featuring fair-trade blends and monthly meetings of gay knitters, the staff there also makes things easy. The workers behind the counter always ask, “For here or to go?” If you say for here, you get your coffee in a ceramic cup.

  Starting at midmorning on a Monday in December 2007, I spent three hours at Joe Coffee Bar. During this time, forty-seven people drank their coffee inside the store. Thirty-three of them either used a Joe mug or brought their own cup.

  Just think how much more of the planet could be saved if Starbucks could be half as successful as Joe at getting customers to drink out of reusable cups. According to my rough sample, less than 1 percent of Starbucks customers in Philly, New Jersey, and New York used the stores’ ceramic mugs. If the company could get half of its in-store customers—as compared to the 75 percent at Joe—to take this option, it could save between 250 and 400 million cups per year. That adds up to a lot of trees and water and energy. Much, much more could be saved this way than from the company’s use of its heavily advertised cups made from 10 percent post–consumer use material. Eric Eisenbud, a chef from West Orange, New Jersey, told a reporter that he always gets his double latte with skim milk in a ceramic mug rather than a paper cup. “I want to save some trees,” he announced, and in this case, he really is doing a little something to that end.26