More than four billion disposable Starbucks to-go cups are distributed and within minutes sent to landfills every single year. Consumers who bring their own reusable to-go cups to Starbucks definitely help reduce the demand for Starbucks’ single-use cups, but barely. In efforts to come up with another solution, a Starbucks in London’s Gatwick Airport is testing a scheme featuring reusable, returnable coffee cups for customers.
It is launching a new campaign called #CupCupandAway in partnership with Hubbub – a UK-based charity that “creates environmental campaigns with a difference.” The campaign intends to reduce the number of single-use cups ending up in landfills without having to put the responsibility on the consumer to make it happen. It is a trial run that will last one month.
Hubbub and Starbucks plan to publish the results from the trial so others can learn from the experiment too. Hubbub writes in a blog post:
The ambition behind the trial is to help create a new culture of reuse on-the-go and explore how customers respond to dropping their cups back off to be washed and used again. The results will give a unique insight into the challenges of changing behavior at a busy international airport. It will discover whether peoples’ concern about plastic waste can be translated into practical action if it is made easy and convenient.
Here’s how the campaign will work:
- Starbucks employees will present guests with two options for their drinks: pay 5p (about 6 cents in USD) to purchase a disposable cup; or, receive a reusable cup for free.
- The trial will feature 2,000 reusable cups, which must be returned before leaving the airport.
- After finishing their coffee, travelers can drop the empty reusable cup off at five different “Cup Check-In” points across the airport.
If things go well, Hubbub is already planning to use Gatwick’s #CupCupandAway as a model for other Starbucks locations — not only in airports but in other environments as well. “In the coming months the partnership will announce further campaigns around the UK built from pioneering cultural research that is currently being undertaken,” Hubbub wrote.
The globe is quickly getting covered in plastic waste and the “to-go” coffee culture is a big part of the problem. Starbucks alone uses more than 8,000 paper cups a minute! That adds up to more than four billion a year. Just to make all those single-use cups, 1.6 million trees have to be harvested every year. The worst part is, since these cups are lined with plastic, they are not usually recyclable. They are so difficult to process that only four U.S. cities even accept Starbucks paper cups for recycling.
Starbucks is the biggest coffee company in the world. There are 15,000 Starbucks in the US and the company plans to open a new store in China every 15 hours. It’s about time the company is held accountable for the damage it’s causing to the environment. If Starbucks doesn’t live up to its goals or its responsibility as a global leader, our plastic pollution problem will only worsen. Hopefully, this trial campaign pans out and more great ideas can manifest from what they learn.
