Coffee Cup Woes: Starbucks’ Environmental Sustainability Challenge

Starbucks Coffee Company Starbucks), the largest coffee chain in the world generated 4 billion single-serve cups as waste each year that ended up in landfills or as litter. The company had to work overtime to solve this problem as its customers and other stakeholders wanted it to do something about the problem. Amid public pressure to curb trash from disposable cups, Starbucks took on the challenge. The cup conundrum Starbucks beverages fill approximately 4 billion cups globally each year. But until recently most of those cups end up in the trash. As Hanna explained, Starbucks has been working on solutions to this problem even before it started hosting its Cup Summits at MIT. The summits began in 2009 when the company engaged Peter Senge along with a wide range of industry leaders, government officials and others in an attempt to explore a systems-based approach to cup recycling. However, tackling the problem was anything but easy and straightforward. The company took various initiatives to curb the waste including offering a long-standing discount of 10 cents to any customer who brought along a reusable cup but with little success. Gordon questions whether the $1 cup will be enough to alter behavior, citing studies that show consumers are more apt to change if charged a fee for something such as plastic bags than given a discount for a better alternative. Still, she welcomes the effort as a "step in the right direction." In 2012, the company was forced to reduce the target of serving beverages in personal tumblers to 5% by 2015 as it was able to achieve less than 2%.Recycling also posed some serious problems as the existing ecosystem was not “designed to take the individual Starbucks cups” due to the presence of a plastic coating inside the cup. Finally, Starbucks in 2013 began rolling out a novel possible solution Thursday: a $1 reusable tumbler. The Seattle-based coffee giant will start selling the plastic cups, bearing its logo and resembling the paper version, at all its company-owned stores in the USA and Canada in a bid to get customers to kick their throwaway habit. It will give a dime discount for each refill so the cup pays for itself after 10 uses. The $1 tumbler is the latest effort to address criticism that food and beverage retailers need to reduce the amount of disposable cups and containers that ends up in landfills or litters streets and waterways. Thousands of people have signed petitions on Change.org, a website promoting social change, urging companies to promote reusable options and abandon polystyrene foam packaging, which is rarely recycled. In 2008, Starbucks took up the target of serving 25% of the beverages in its company-operated stores in reusable cups by 2015. It also committed itself to making 100% of its paper cups in company-operated stores in North America recyclable by 2015. However, some retailers have cited concerns that reusing cups could cause cross-contamination of germs, according to Miriam Gordon of the California chapter of Clean Water Action, an environmental group. "There's this fear of liability.

Questions

1. Identify three (3) issues related to corporate sustainability in being a globally and environmentally responsible company.

2. Identify the importance and need for environmental sustainability for a company like Starbucks.

3. Discuss and debate Starbucks’ approach toward environmental sustainability, particularly its initiatives to address the issue of waste generated by disposable coffee cups. (Should they consider the cost?)(Should they also consider the fact that so many other Companies in the World contributes to waste and they do nothing to stop it?)

4. What may be some of the issues and challenges in convincing consumers to adopt to reusable cups and problems in recycling paper cups?

5. Explore ways in which Starbucks can address the above issues effectively.