Starbucks cup

I became interested in Starbucks cups after studying green living. The Starbucks cup is not recyclable, but now “Starbucks, the Seattle coffee company, plans to announce Wednesday that will start stocking its store with cups made with 10 percent recycled material” (warner, 2004, para. 2). Starbucks is one of the famous coffee shops, so they use a lot of cups. According to Warner (2004), Starbucks uses an estimated 1.5 billion cups annually. It is incredibly a lot, but they don’t switch to recyclable material, because the cost is too high. Also Warner (2004) said that “The higher cost is one reason that other food companies have not switched to recycled cups” (warner, 2004, para. 7). Some people think it is good to try even 10 percent, but some other people think this is too little. Adewumi (2007) said that if we bring our own mugs it saves about 674,000 pounds of paper. The real problem is people never care about whether the environment is being destroyed or not. Today, nobody thinks how they can protect the environment.

There would be some problems if they tried to switch to recyclable cups, but they didn’t try, because it is expensive, Starbucks cups make a lot of wasting paper and the environment is being destroyed, because of logging lots of trees to make paper cups.

First, I believe that Starbucks earns a lot nowadays as everyone knows, but I don’t understand why they care about money too much to change to recycled cups. I just think negatively, because I believe they don’t care whether the environment is destroyed or not. I mean they just do that because they want to show us that Starbucks is really worried about the environment in a commercial. If they really are worried, they ought to switch more than 10%.

Second, Starbucks uses more than 1.5 billion paper cups annually, and such a large amount of paper becomes garbage now (Anderson, 2006). If they are really eco-friendly, they should find a method to help the environment. Also Starbucks needs to announce that if consumers bring their own mug, it will be cheaper to consumers. Actually that way is the best way to reduce wasting paper and to save money. I think what Starbucks should do is to make price reduced more if consumers bring their own mugs.

Third, paper is made from virgin trees, and virgin trees require too many ways. However, the paper is not recyclable, so we need to keep logging incredible number of trees. As everyone knows, the trees are limited and the most important thing is we cannot live without trees. Nevertheless, Starbucks wastes more than 1.5 billion paper cups a year. In fact, nobody can tell Starbucks to switch, but Starbucks ought to consider about that if they care about the environment strongly.

Some people say that it is really good to try to include even 10% recycled material. However I strongly disagree about that. !0% is too little to make the environment better. It is recyclable actually, but it is not practical. Starbucks said that it was just first step, but they have not taken another step yet. I believe that they just wanted to attract consumers for selling their products.

In conclusion, they do try what other shops don’t, but I think it is just competition, not being worried about the environment. They just want to show people, they are doing so many things for the environment. I didn’t know anything about this before I read this article, so people don’t know what problems Starbucks actually has. Everyone should know and realize, and then they should make them consider the problems they have.

Reference

Adewumi, D. (2007, September 27). Starbucks, local coffee shops’ cups not recyclable. Collegian. Retrieved on April 16, 2008, from http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2007/09/27/starbucks_local_coffee_shops_c.aspx

Anderson, D. (2006, September 19). Creating the eco-cup. CNN. Retrieved on April 16, 2008, from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_achive/2006/10/02/8387528/index.htm

Warner, M. (2004, November 17). Starbucks continues to Greenwash with Weak Environmental Policy. New York Times News Service. Organic Consumers Association. Retrieved on April 16, 2008, from http://www.organicconsumers.org/starbugs/recycle.cfm