Everything but the Coffee (30 page)

Michael d’Estries made a similar discovery. His Starbucks in greenish Ithaca, New York, he found, didn’t recycle. When he asked a clerk where the recycling bin was, she pointed to the trash can. Same thing happened to him in Evanston, Illinois. After he finished a bottle of Ethos Water, he looked for the recycling bin. Again, he asked the barista where to put the empty, and she nodded toward the regular trash can.
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Without recycling bins, just about all of the earth-toned napkins and java jackets made from 65 percent post–consumer use materials went
into the trash—at Starbucks, on the streets, and at offices and schools. Same with the newspapers lying around the stores and wooden stirrers and empty sugar packets on the tables. The plastic cups—they got dumped into the trash, too.

Recycling Starbucks’ hot cups, however, presents another challenge. “Starbucks paper cups used for hot beverages,” explains the company’s corporate social responsibility report, “are made of paper fiber with a lining of low-density polyethylene plastic. The paper provides the rigidity for the cup, while the plastic layer keeps the paper layer intact by protecting it from the hot beverage. This plastic layer also makes the hot beverage cups unrecyclable in most paper recycling systems.”
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So there is no place for these cups to go but into the trash. And then the waste cycle starts again, and, we—all of us, even those of us who don’t go to Starbucks—start to pay. Some cups end up in incinerators and release pollutants into the air. Most go to the dump. Starbucks pays Waste Management or some other company to haul the cups away. The trash movers bill Starbucks, and Starbucks bills its customers, folding the costs into the price of its drinks. When consumers leave the store with their white paper cups and plop them into a city trash can or toss them into the gutter or pitch them onto the subway tracks, we all—this time as tax-payers, not as customers—pay again. Municipal workers are the ones who clean up the mess and lug away the trash. Taxpayers foot this bill. According to Bruce Walker, head of Portland’s sustainable development and recycling program, “What we know from looking at concrete garbage cans that are on our public streets is that a lot of the trash in them is either coffee cups or the plastic containers people get for take-out food . . .. Our office spends over $200,000 a year for pick-up of these trashcans.”
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Starbucks, I learned on my holiday trip and from my research around it, might care about the environment and do what it can to lighten its footprint, but it isn’t moving fast enough to keep up with the stirrers, napkins, cardboard, java jackets, lids, and paper and plastic cups. Really, it isn’t moving fast enough to outrun throwaway consumption. Even as
its business declines, the garbage is winning. Gaining the advantage over trash would mean changing people’s behavior and getting them to recycle more, drink out of reusable cups, and give up a little of the flexibility and comfort of our go-go culture’s takeaway lifestyle. In the end, it would mean confronting the larger environmental implications of our coffee decisions. But this could upset some people who pay a premium for their lattes in exchange for reassurances that they are helping the planet, for innocence by association, for the feeling that they aren’t part of the problem anymore.

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This point brings it all back to Al Gore’s dilemma—the dilemma of pursuing solutions to highly complex social problems through buying and buying alone. No doubt, as polls indicate, Americans, led by the young, the better educated, and the higher-paid, care about the environment. But once they take politics—formal politics—out of the mix, they are left with showing that they care through the marketplace, through what they buy. This kind of response leads to easy solutions—for both companies and consumers—and, even more alarmingly, to a kind of intellectual complacency. We are told we can have it all, and we like to believe that somehow convenience and a cleaner environment can easily and seamlessly go together. It is hard to imagine that they can. Yet companies making money off this kind of thinking aren’t likely to challenge this ideology and this practice.

In 2008, Starbucks demonstrated once again the tension between green corporate politics and catering to consumer convenience. With profits dipping and the bad news piling up, Starbucks issued a press statement. Company officials announced that within seven years, it would recycle more, rely on more reusable cups, and get more post-consumer use materials into its takeaway containers. Starbucks didn’t close all of its stores, though, like it did when its coffeeness came under attack, to train its baristas in greener ways.
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In actuality, it took some steps in the opposite direction. Only a few months before Starbucks publicly
renewed its environmental commitments, it introduced a new item it called a “splash stick.” A couple of inches tall, these plastic stirrers fit snuggly into the small drinking hole at the top of the lid. Their purpose was to prevent hot coffee from squirting out. “Only Starbucks would think of something like this!” proclaimed Howard Schultz. Perhaps he is right. Customers get convenience, but what happens to the environment and to green politics when the company introduces millions of extraneous plastic, and not reusable, sticks into the ecosystem? The same thing happened with Starbucks’ oatmeal. Put on the menu in 2008 in that season of corporate discontent, as a healthy breakfast alternative to chocolate chip muffins and blueberry scones, the hot cereal came in a throwaway paper bowl with a plastic spoon wrapped in plastic, plastic packs of raisins and granola, and a paper pack of brown sugar. Everything came in a brown paper bag. Essentially, the oatmeal and the splash stick catered to the needs of takeaway consumption. Each meant more trash, more dependence on oil, and more not-so-earth-friendly, self-centered buying. Yet Starbucks still promised on each paper cup to “help the planet.”
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For most people, the contradictions between the splash sticks and corporate promises didn’t matter. They kept buying their coffee in cups made from some post–consumer waste materials that ended up in the landfill, content that they had done something, which they thought was better than nothing. But for others, Starbucks might have activated a sense of environmentalism. This worked just like it did with coffee. Throughout the Starbucks moment, Starbucks turned many Americans on to truly better coffee.
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When the company could no longer fulfill (or didn’t seem to fulfill) its coffee promises and the market expanded to offer more choices, the most devoted, knowledgeable, and self-conscious coffee drinkers defected to other brands with superior beans, fresher roasts, and better narratives. A similar process happened on the green front. With its online tutorials and
New York Times
Earth Day ads, Starbucks raised its customers’ environmental expectations. Often, though, it didn’t deliver.

Starbucks could have met the green challenge by going the way of Joe Coffee Bar and other coffeehouses, encouraging latte drinkers to use ceramic cups and reusable bowls and utensils. It could have gone the way of its Seattle competitor, Tully’s, and used fully compostable (and expensive) to-go cups.
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It could have put numerous recycling bins in every store. And it could have made many of these moves right away, instead of promises about seven years down the line. But it didn’t. Because of its foot dragging and because it was just so big, Starbucks surely lost some business here and there to greener places. But the even bigger problem, when it came to mainstream status seekers, was that green was becoming rather commonplace by 2009. Everyone was green. Cities were green. Universities were green. Companies were green. Even Fritos went green.
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Commentators were starting to talk about “green fatigue.”
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In this climate, a company like Starbucks couldn’t distinguish itself from its competitors so easily on the environmental front anymore, even if it had wanted to ditch the splash sticks and oatmeal containers.

Starbucks corporate leaders in the era of the New Depression probably also knew that green didn’t distinguish its customers so clearly any-more, either. Caring about the planet had lost some of its distinctive appeal; it had been mainstreamed. After all, who wasn’t green? In the business Starbucks was in, the business of selling status-spiked coffee, the company had incentives, at least some negatives ones, to clean up its trash. It didn’t want to—it couldn’t—appear anti-green. But it couldn’t score many points on the green front, either, by introducing dramatic changes. Why, then, rush in new directions? Why push? So Starbucks stood still, helping to save the planet the same way it always had, and the trash cans kept filling up with those paper cups made from overwhelmingly virgin white paper.

Sleeping Soundly in the Age of Globalization

“I like the little man’s coffee,” a gangly, smiling, and animated New Yorker told filmmaker Adam Patrick Jones in 2006. “I like the little guys who make coffee on farms and sell their coffee to little people. I don’t like the big guys.”
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By then, Starbucks was definitely a “big guy,” and that was a problem for the company. In the post-9/11 era, this New Yorker wanted to see a little less exploitation at the bottom of his cup. He wanted what he drank to somehow help the little guy, a little guy who resembled a noble, bent-backed farmer diligently toiling away on a small patch of land in some far-off place. If Starbucks, that big guy, wanted the business of the people who cared about little guys, it had to convince them that it walked softly in the global order and that it made the world a better place for the people at the bottom and for its customers, who wanted their purchases to make them look better. As long as the company could pull this off, it could charge a feel-good premium for its products, and latte drinkers would pay the freight without grumbling.

“I want to make a difference in the world,” read the sign on a Starbucks wall projecting the thoughts of many of the coffee company’s customers. That matched what the Luxury Institute of New York discovered in 2007. “Ethics,” as the group called them, played an important
role in buying decisions. As Milton Pedraza, the institute’s chief executive, explained, “Our research shows that if wealthy consumers know that a luxury brand is socially responsible they will give the brand greater purchase consideration over a brand with a similar quality and service.”
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This report suggested something else, something beyond social concern. It showed that status in the postneed economy turned on more than just conspicuous consumption. Showing you cared made you look better and put you in a higher social class.

On the global front, consumers seemed to want solutions to the poverty and inequities generated by the neoliberal order. But they chose private, nongovernment—neoliberal, actually—remedies to fix things. Two years before the Luxury Institute published its revealing report, Cone, the same consulting firm that conducted the survey on consumers and the environment showing just how cool Al Gore had become, made a similar finding. According to its report, many Americans—especially higher-income and younger Americans—wanted the companies they bought from to act ethically. They wanted them to provide benefits to employees, support social issues, and bolster human rights. In short, they wanted them to take on the responsibilities that earlier generations had assigned to government, including foreign affairs. They wanted business to become an ethical global actor and service the larger good.

Geographers David Bell and Gill Valentine noted a similar shift, one linked rather strongly to the expansion of the global economy. According to their findings, the well-heeled were growing uneasy in the early years of the twenty-first century “about the role export pressure of exotic produce—including coffee—plays in sustaining and even deepening inequalities in new global relations of capital accumulation dominated by multinational corporations.” Having given up on government solutions, however, these consumers called for what Bell and Valentine tagged “ethical consumption.”
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Going back to the prewar “Union Label” and “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns and the California grape and Nestlé boy-cotts of the 1960s and beyond, ethical consumption clearly has a long
history in the United States. Traditionally, it set out to tie together buying and politics. Whatever the issue, activists tried to get consumers to use their buying power to affect political outcomes or raise political consciousness. Each effort was linked to a larger power struggle. Sometimes ethical consumption stressed the role of buying in preventing the exploitation of labor and the environment. Other times it tried to make partisan political statements or shape policy.
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In the branded world of private remedies, things got turned on their head. Responding to surveys and focus groups like the ones conducted by the Luxury Institute and Cone, companies crafted messages from above and reworked, without saying so, the meaning of ethical consumption. Buy a red shirt at the Gap. and we are told that we can ease the AIDS crisis in Africa. Pay a little more for high-quality coffee, and we can improve the lives of perpetually exploited farmers in the under-developed world. In these corporate-designed narratives of change, the poor in Africa and Latin America quickly became symbols as the buyers emerge as the main subjects. If we buy right, not only will the lives of others improve, but so will our lives and our self-images. The “little” people on the ground, moreover, will pay us back for our generosity by liking us and maybe even embracing our values. We get to look better as individuals and have a better foreign policy all at once.

Molding itself once again to fit the moment, Starbucks created its own version of ethical consumption in the global economy. As a starting point, it portrayed itself as one of the world’s good guys, as an exceptional company driven not by the winds and whims of the market but by its own steadfast and genuine values to do right. We do right, the company insisted, because it is the right thing to do, not the profitable thing to do. But Starbucks was quick to add, perhaps with Wall Street and its stockholders in mind, that doing right was good for business and for you, the consumer. Buy from us, it said, and we will help “little guys” around the world earn higher incomes. Freed from poverty, they will become like us—they will become peaceful consumers pursuing middle-class ambitions.