SEATTLE — In yet another sign of corporate America’s growing focus on environmental sustainability, Starbucks has launched an ambitious plan to cut its waste, water use and carbon emissions in half by 2030.
The plan, announced Tuesday by Starbucks CEO and President Kevin Johnson, appears to be driven by a mix of government regulation, activist pressure and internal concerns about the Seattle-based company’s image as the public pays closer attention to environmental issues.
Starbucks’ promise comes just a week after Microsoft vowed that by 2030 it would be “carbon negative,” meaning it would remove more carbon from the environment than its own operations and supply chain emit each year. Starbucks would go further, promising to eventually remove more carbon than it emits while also becoming a net producer of water — though it gave no timeline for becoming what it called “a bold, multi-decade aspiration” to become “resource positive.”
The initiative would have five main goals: add more menu items that are “plant-based”; shift from single-use to reusable packaging; invest in new farming and forestry practices that conserve water; reduce material waste and food waste through better recycling; and develop more “eco-friendly stores, operations, manufacturing and delivery.”
“I see today as a milestone for our business as we declare our concern about our planet’s future and commit to do more,” Johnson wrote in a letter to shareholders and customers. He added that meeting those goals, which he stressed were “preliminary,” would not interfere with the company’s commitment to “our long-term, double-digit (earnings per share) growth model.”
Starbucks’ initiative would cover the full range of the coffee giant’s sprawling global operations — including the water consumed by its coffee suppliers, the climate-altering carbon dioxide emitted by the dairy cattle that supply its milk, and the waste produced at its more than 31,000 retail stores.
Starbucks also released what it calls an Environment Baseline Report, which detailed the breadth and scope of the company’s impacts as of 2018. It will be used by the company — and, presumably, its critics — to measure the success of the initiatives.
One striking takeaway of the report is that much of Starbucks’ “footprints” for carbon, water and waste relate to its heavy reliance on dairy products, which are both directly and indirectly responsible for just over a fifth of the company’s carbon emissions and just over a seventh of its water use.
Tuesday’s announcement was greeted with cautious optimism by a number of environmental groups, including several that have previously criticized Starbucks’ track record on reducing waste.
Tyson Miller, forests programs director with Stand.earth, which has pushed Starbucks to eliminate disposable cups, applauded the aims of the new initiative but sought specifics on how those goals would come about. “The ultimate question will be, how is it implemented,” Miller said, pointing out that on several occasions, Starbucks has laid out bold goals on sustainability “that had to be walked back.”
Indeed, while Starbucks has succeeded with some of its social initiatives, such as shifting to ethically produced beans for nearly all of its coffee supply and moving to energy-efficient buildings, the company has struggled on other matters, such as waste reduction and recycling.
