Starbucks announces new environmental goals after Post trash raid

By: Jon L.

Starbucks is brewing up a new environmental plan.

After a New York Post investigation showing rampant food waste at company stores across New York City, the coffee shop empire has rolled out a new set of ambitious green goals.

“Today, more than ever, the world needs leadership in environmental sustainability,” Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson said in a statement last week. “Our aspiration is to become resource positive – storing more carbon than we emit, eliminating waste, and providing more clean freshwater than we use.”

Johnson said the company would commit to 50% reductions in carbon emissions, landfill waste and water withdrawal by 2030 — a date the company noted was a “preliminary target.”

Local activist Anna Sacks was encouraged by the announcement. “I think it’s great. I think that they should be setting these goals and working with experts and monitoring it and they should be transparent.”

During a nighttime raid of Starbucks’ trash recently, Sacks, a former investment banker who now works at a waste reduction consultancy, found a small mountain of healthy, unsold food. Many of the sandwiches and snack packages Starbucks employees discarded were still in their original wrapping. The food, most of which was at its sell by date, would have been gladly accepted by soup kitchens around the city, according to the food rescue non-profit Rethink Food NYC.

After announcing ambitious goals in 2016 “to rescue 100% of the unsold food available from all 8,000 of its US company-owned stores” by 2021, Starbucks revealed that only about 60% of stores were currently participating — a rate suggesting the company will fall short of its target.

Sacks says it’s important for ordinary consumers and shareholders to keep up the pressure too.

“It’s not just about Starbucks, it’s about everyone working together,” she said.