Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#31

Post by ugh »

danteembermage wrote: post #17
ohyes wrote: post #7

I wonder why they don't come up with a cheap, washable cup that the customers 'borrow' for the duration of drinking coffee. You buy a coffee for 3 bucks, you get the cup for a dollar, and you get a dollar back when you return the cup. They wash the cup and use it again. It would be like getting it 'for here', but you give some collateral against the price of the cup, and can leave. There are enough Starbucks within t…

I wonder if health liability doesn't drive this, at least partially. Also, do Starbucks have dish washing facilities currently? That adds a lot of space to the footprint of their small stores (It looks to me as though Starbucks can currently just about be run out of a hallway). I'm not trying to be critical of the approach, I think it's great, it just seems like there might be some nontrivial costs to implementing it…

You can get your coffee in a ceramic mug (I have only ever been in European Starbucks but it would seem weird if that’s not a worldwide thing.) so they must have some sort of dish washing capability.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#32

Post by tbrownaw »

jasonkester wrote: post #22
robryan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make it compulsory to bring your own cup, which they also sell in store if you don't yet have a suitable one. This would be great but given the competitive nature of the industry would only work in certain locations where people are more environmentally conscious.

Ever been to a grocery store that forced you to buy bags to take your stuff home? More specifically, ever been back to that store? It just doesn't work (for us Americans at least).

Yes. They also had the carts locked up so you needed to deposit a quarter (which you got back by locking your cart up again), didn't take credit cards (only debit/cash), and didn't have name-brand anything.

It worked fine, except that their bread would often start to grow mold by the time we were maybe two-thirds through a loaf (which doesn't seem to happen with bread from other stores). We'd probably still go there for other things, except that we always need bread and going to two separate stores is annoying.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#34

Post by robryan »

jasonkester wrote: post #22
robryan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make it compulsory to bring your own cup, which they also sell in store if you don't yet have a suitable one. This would be great but given the competitive nature of the industry would only work in certain locations where people are more environmentally conscious.

Ever been to a grocery store that forced you to buy bags to take your stuff home? More specifically, ever been back to that store? It just doesn't work (for us Americans at least).

In general, I don't think it would work in many places in Australia either. People have grown to comfortable with consuming and are unable to see real consequences on any time frame that matters to them.

The market will eventually sort this out, but not before it is far to later.

Recently I have encouraged to know that many people pay the green electricity surcharge, which means you are subsidizing more green sources of power being integrated into the grid, I'd assumed that they would have a really low uptake on that kind of thing.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#35

Post by itistoday »

ohyes wrote: post #7

I wonder why they don't come up with a cheap, washable cup that the customers 'borrow' for the duration of drinking coffee. You buy a coffee for 3 bucks, you get the cup for a dollar, and you get a dollar back when you return the cup. They wash the cup and use it again. It would be like getting it 'for here', but you give some collateral against the price of the cup, and can leave. There are enough Starbucks within t…

This is the solution. Disposable shit is bad, period. They could also reward customers with $0.50 off (or whatever) their purchase for bringing in their own cup. They can retrofit their machines to charge only for the amount of liquid dispensed into the cup (instead of having only 3 sizes), and throw marketing dollars at the whole thing.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#36

Post by robryan »

ars wrote: post #27
maukdaddy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the WWF ( http://www.worldwildlife.org/sites/TED/change.html ) it takes 53 gallons of water to make 1 latte. A great deal of this water is used in making the cup. So why use all that water for a product that gets trashed?

We use water for lots of things. Why are we focusing on the cup? There are much better places to conserve water. Crop irrigation, and getting rid of septic systems would be where I would start. Don't grow crops in places where you need to irrigate (or at least reduce it), and septic systems waste water, instead of recycling it like a sewer does.

I think that for a company that is supplying billions of cups a year that end up in landfill focusing on the cup should be a priority.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#37

Post by jessriedel »

maukdaddy wrote: post #29
ars wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper uses more resources to recycle (especially water) than it uses to make it fresh. It's a feel good thing that does more harm than good. Putting paper in the ground is excellent from a CO2 sequestering point of view as well.

Awww don't disappoint me like that Ars. Paper in the ground is the opporite of CO2 sequestering because you had to cut down a TREE to make that paper. A living tree is, by definition, a CO2 sequestering machine. Also, throwing paper and organic matter into modern landfills, which promote anaerobic breakdown, produces methane. As you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Just to make Ars's point clear: the equilibium state of a forest is carbon neutral. Trees absorb carbon as they grown, then release it after death as they decay. Compared to an empty field, creating a forest stores a fixed, one-shot amount of carbon (however much carbon is in the trees at a given time); it is not a sequestering machine. If you could replace the forest with landfill which was inert and held more carbon in the form of paper than the forest, this would give a net decrease in atmospheric carbon.

Obviously, there are issues of decreased species diversity, chemical leaching, etc., when replacing a forest with a landfill that this account doesn't consider.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#38

Post by nwatson »

maukdaddy wrote: post #29
ars wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper uses more resources to recycle (especially water) than it uses to make it fresh. It's a feel good thing that does more harm than good. Putting paper in the ground is excellent from a CO2 sequestering point of view as well.

Awww don't disappoint me like that Ars. Paper in the ground is the opporite of CO2 sequestering because you had to cut down a TREE to make that paper. A living tree is, by definition, a CO2 sequestering machine. Also, throwing paper and organic matter into modern landfills, which promote anaerobic breakdown, produces methane. As you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Assuming the decay from paper-cup-watse -> CO2-and-other-greenhouse-gases is very slow (compared to the regrowth time for a tree) then cutting down trees, turning them into paper cups, and burying the cups is an excellent carbon-sequestering tool.

Compare the two approaches:

(1) don't cut the tree == one tree-worth of carbon sequestered (as the tree matures its carbon-weight does not grow as quickly)

(2) cut down a tree 5 times in 20 years and create 5 trees-worth of cups and put them in a landfill == 5-trees of landfill carbon + 1 immature tree of carbon (more realistically probably not 6x but 2x-3x)

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#39

Post by stellar678 »

jessriedel wrote: post #5

I don't want to start an environmental flame war, but... Isn't the disposal of inert materials in landfills one of the lease important environmental problems? Yes, if you're cutting down rain forests to make your cups, infusing them with CFCs, or using terrawatts of fossil-fuel-based power, then there are issues to discuss. But if you're just putting paper in a big pile somewhere, there's basically no issue. For all…

If you design systems to have a one-way flow of materials, they are inherently unsustainable. At some point, you'll run out of source materials and/or space to put waste.

Re: The Starbucks Cup Dilemma - Corporate Social Responsibility

#40

Post by dmm »

maukdaddy wrote: post #26
dmm wrote: post #6

Polystyrene foam (styrofoam) is an extremely recyclable material. I don't think many people have access to recycling facilities though. Interesting problem! EDIT: Another thought: aluminum. It's expensive and highly recyclable. Another benefit is that you have a small army of homeless picking the streets clean of the valuable metal. Can't find a recycling bin? Just toss it in the gutter! It'll find it's way.

Aluminum would be a terrible material for a container that holds liquids at temperatures of 150+ (65C+)

How come? Thermal conductivity? Perhaps it could be covered in cardboard.

What about glass?

Post reply on HN