Starbucks has announced they will test out a new “environmentally friendly” cup with bioplastic to try and cut back on the amount of trash they produce every day. According to a report by CNN, the test cups will have a compostable liner, which will replace the plastic liner that they normally use.
The new cups are the result of a NextGen Cup Challenge held by Closed Loop Partners that had almost 500 submissions from over 50 countries. The program was founded by Starbucks and McDonald’s as a way to try and reduce the 250 billion fiber to-go cups that are used annually.
The five test markets will include New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and London. The new cups are still made from paper, so the look and feel should be pretty much the same. Inside there is normally a petroleum-based liner, this is replaced with a compostable liner.
The BioPBS cup is made by PTT MCC Biochem Company Limited based in Bangkok, Thailand. These Starbucks bioplastic cups will be tested out for a limited time, and according to Bioplastics Magazine, the company will continue to work with key stakeholders in the recycling industry to increase the overall recyclability of their cups.
Chief Sustainability Officer for Starbucks, Michael Kobori, commented:
We know finding a more sustainable cup solution will continue to require partnership and innovative thinking. The ongoing work from the NextGen Cup Consortium provides valuable insights and learnings for all the members, us included, as we continue to explore a variety of ways to better manage our waste and reduce our environmental footprint.
Supposedly, Starbucks has been working on a solution for many years, only to keep pushing the date farther and farther back. In 2008, as part of the company’s “Shared Planet” initiative, they pledged that 25 percent of their Starbucks cups would be reusable by 2015. Here we are in 2020, 12 years later, and that still hasn’t happened.
In March 2019, Starbucks Chief Executive Kevin Johnson said;
We are reimagining the future for Starbucks, and for the more than 30,000 communities we serve each day, with a great sense of responsibility for a more sustainable planet.
With the new testing being done in 5 markets around the world that leaves more than 29,000 that will have to wait to see how well these “testings” go, which are designed to give the company key insights into the goal of “no noticeable difference” in the cups.
The new cups will still require special equipment to separate the liner from the cups, so they can be composted. The likelihood of this actually happening, given the amount of people who drink Starbucks coffee every day is pretty low.
Starbucks net profit for 2019 was $3.6 billion. One would think they may have a little bit extra money to spend on some research and development of a biodegradable coffee cup in the past 12 years.
