Starbucks lays waste
Walking home from work tonight, I saw this fairly impressive pile of garbage bags being thrown out at closing time outside the Starbucks on 9th Avenue and 15th Street in Manhattan. While in and of itself it’s a fair amount of trash, you have to remember that most people get their coffee to go at Starbucks, meaning they don’t throw out their cups in the store but someplace else. I don’t have any hard statistics on this, but it’s probably fair to say that about 75% of all Starbucks customers get it to go, so these 20 bags outside of the 9th Avenue store is really just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, since Starbucks sells primarily one product, the range of refuse and total size of waste per customer is fairly small — mostly cups, lids, coffee grounds and related packaging.
Using the Starbucks website store locater tool, it appears there are about 220 Starbucks locations in the New York area (the 5 boroughs + the very eastern edge of Jersey). If each store produces 20 bags of garbage every day, you’re looking at close to 4,500 plastic bags full of cups and coffee grounds. If this is potentially only 25% of the waste produced by Starbucks and its customers on any given day in New York City…yikes.