Starbucks' BYO Cup Program: A Tale of Disguised Corporate Waste

Let’s get this out of the way: Starbucks’ coffee usually tastes a bit burnt and is generally not as good as local coffee shops. But, Starbucks is convenient because they have a ton of locations (and drive-thrus), and they’re at least consistent in that each location uses the same ingredients (even if their baristas never put the same amount of them in your cup).

While I have favorite local coffee shops which I prefer to patronize, sometimes it’s just easier to go by Starbucks in the morning. In these cases, I will usually try to remember to bring my own Yeti cup so I can take advantage of their bring-your-own-cup program. Sure, call me a hippy dippy, tree-hugging liberal, but the biggest appeal is that my drink will stay hot for a lot longer. And, you know, if you can save a disposable cup from a landfill, why not? On top of that, Starbucks actually incentivizes customers to use the program, offering a 10¢ discount on your drink. I don’t go to Starbucks nearly enough for that to add up to anything worthwhile, but nonetheless, it’s slightly better than nothing. Combining those three very mild incentives (a tiny discount, feeling good about saving a cup, and having my drink stay hot) is enough to get me to play along.

Participating is a fairly straightforward process: I’ll place my order and let the barista know I’ve brought my own cup, and they proceed to take my cup and then a few minutes later I find it at the end of the bar with my beverage inside it. For the past several months, though, I’ve been noticing an aggravating and confusing trend.

Occasionally I’ll find myself watching as the barista prepares my drink, and lately I’ve been seeing a paper or plastic cup (depending on whether I’ve ordered something hot or cold) accompany my reusable cup as it makes its way down the line of drinks waiting to be prepared. What’s happening is the baristas are preparing my drink in the paper cup (which bears a sticker denoting what I’ve ordered), and then they simply pour the beverage from the paper cup into my reusable one before giving it back to me.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that this completely defeats the purpose of Starbucks offering a reusable cup discount program. From a financial perspective, Starbucks doesn’t save any money this way because they still end up using a paper or plastic cup anyway. From an eco-friendly perspective, there’s no difference here than if they’d just delivered the drink in the disposable cup anyway. While there’s a slight chance they could be recycling the plastic cups, Starbucks’ paper cups (like most paper cups) are lined on the inside to prevent liquid from breaking down the paper, and lined paper products can’t be recycled at all by most cities in the country. Those cups are definitely landfill bound.

CopyrightBro correspondents interviewed multiple Starbucks baristas and store managers in stores across the southeast, and we’ve been able to learn a bit more about this program and how it’s implemented. One Charlotte-area barista, when asked why she initially prepared the drink in the disposable cup, simply respond with “this is just how we were trained.” When our correspondent followed up with “doesn’t using a paper cup sort of defeat the purpose of having a reusable cup program?” she replied, “yeah, it’s a little off.” These sentiments were echoed by other baristas from other areas of the country, indicating that this is a pervasive issue stemming from a corporate directive, rather than a case of one or two rogue employees in charge of training. When asked what the purpose was behind this policy, one Memphis-area barista said “It kind of makes sense with the drive-thru because we don’t get their cup until they get to the window, but for customers in the cafe, it doesn’t make any sense, it is really stupid and wasteful.” When asked if they couldn’t just prepare drive-thru customers’ drinks in reusable containers before transferring them to the personal cups, he replied “yeah, there’s really no reason that wouldn’t work”.

This barista estimated that while roughly 20% of regular customers might bring their own cups, the total percentage would be far lower, likely around 1%. This figure is consistent with Starbucks’ Global Social Impact Report from 2018, which reported that in the preceding year, 1.3% of customers had received the personal cup discount. The report goes on to presume that the program therefore saved 42 million disposable cups, but this figure ignores reality, because we know that not nearly all of those 42 million transactions actually resulted in a saved cup.

Getting more into the numbers, back in 2011, Starbucks was at 1.9% adoption with their personal cup program, and they set a goal of reaching 5% adoption by 2015; clearly, they missed. By a lot. Interestingly, their 2018 report actually amends their goal and uses grandiose language like “double the use of reusable cups”, which sounds great but ignores the fact that personal cup use has actually declined by 32% since 2011. Doubling an adoption rate of 1.3% still only gets you to 2.6%, and doesn’t account for the fact that many of the transactions represented by those figures still waste plenty of cups. They’ve given themselves several years to achieve what they want you to believe is a lofty goal, aiming to achieve this measly 2.6% program adoption by 2022.

If the point of the personal cup discount is to incentivize customers to use the program for the benefit of the environment, then 10¢ is hardly enough to move anyone to action; if the point of the discount is to simply pass the savings from the one saved paper cup onto the customer, that’s nice of them, but kind of pointless if they end up using a paper cup in the process of preparing the drinks anyway. The barista from Memphis also expressed concerns that “the 10¢ discount is pointless”, and that it doesn’t really incentivize anyone to use the program — it’s hard to imagine that he could be wrong — you could find more than ten cents in a Starbucks parking lot at any given moment. If Starbucks wants people to take this program seriously, they need to stop wasting disposable cups, and they need to offer an incentive greater than a dime; a 25¢ discount as a part of a program that a less than two percent of their customers use seems manageable for a company as successful as Starbucks.

CopyrightBro reached out to the Starbucks Global Communications team for more information on why there’s such a defined trend of employees being trained to waste cups, and a Starbucks Spokesperson provided the following comment: “Starbucks baristas are encouraged to craft beverages directly in customers’ reusable cups whenever possible. Building on our long standing commitment to sustainability and an elevated customer experience, we are currently reviewing guidance to our partners about personal cup use as we continue to be mindful of waste.” While this comment shifts blame to the individual baristas, the pattern observed across a large geographic regions is too pronounced to be so easily explained away. The operative phrase from the comment provided seems to be “whenever possible”. This phrase could provide a tremendous amount of leeway to those mid-level corporate employees issuing directives to train employees in a manner contrary to the official guidance while deflecting the responsibility to the individual baristas by retorting that the official guidance is for them to use their own discretion. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why so many baristas would report having been trained in a manner inconsistent with the comment provided.

The problem here doesn’t seem to be a few poorly trained employees, but rather a culture that focuses more on looking like they want to help the environment, rather than actually putting effort into doing so: it seems like their commitment to protecting the environment is just a P.R. move for Starbucks. Even more embarrassingly for a Fortune 500 company, it’s losing money from a financial standpoint. What kind of lunacy would lead a company to introduce a program that could cut costs on materials and make a positive environmental impact, only to have employees waste the same amount of materials anyway? They’ve effectively disguised a pattern of material and financial waste as a program designed to benefit the environment.

CopyrightBro does not encourage anyone to take advantage of corporate good will, but if you notice that a barista prepares your beverage in a disposable cup and then throws it away after transferring your drink to your personal cup, you can submit a complaint about what happened on Starbuck’s contact page, and they’ll typically credit your Starbucks Card with five or six bucks to get another drink, as well as pass down the feedback to the store your visited. Customers are going to have to hold Starbucks’ feet to the fire on this one: make sure you let them know how you feel next time their employees are unnecessarily wasteful on your behalf.