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One woman took on Starbucks… and the world listened

This month Starbucks’ “green” image took a hit because one curious, and concerned, customer asked a simple question. When Lisa Woolfe noticed, in her London-area Starbucks, a sink behind the counter with its tap running, she asked why.

Unfortunately for Starbucks, and fortunately for those who understand that water is a limited resource, the Starbucks executive responded to her query with a letter, thereby revealing their policy to leave a “dipper well” with a constantly running tap (to clean utensils) in every store worldwide.

A simple question

This month Starbucks’ “green” image took a hit because one curious, and concerned, customer asked a simple question.

When Lisa Woolfe noticed, in her London-area Starbucks, a sink behind the counter with its tap running, she asked why. “The assistant said the store was told to keep it running as it cleaned the pipes. I could not believe it but when we contacted head office, they confirmed that the taps were left on and the water was not recycled.”

Unfortunately for Starbucks, and fortunately for those who understand that water is a limited resource, the Starbucks executive responded to her query with a letter, thereby revealing their policy to leave a “dipper well” with a constantly running tap (to clean utensils) in every store worldwide.

The Sun newspaper went public with the letter along with their investigation, including hidden camera video of running taps in Starbucks stores throughout the UK (now on youtube).

This exchange at a Covent Garden Starbucks is typical of their findings:

“The Sun- You left the tap on.
Starbucks barrista- Yes.
The Sun- It’s supposed to be like that. Oh sorry. So it’s always on.
Starbucks barrista- Nothing we can do about it. They want to have it like that. Health and safety they say.”

The story spreads from New Zealand to the Persian Gulf
Within hours the story had gone viral across newspapers and websites worldwide.

Hidden cameras capture Starbucks’ water waste

Soon, it became common knowledge that what Lisa Woolfe had noticed in her local English Starbucks could be seen in the company’s stores around the world.

The Sun sent scouts to stores worldwide to document running taps in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney (in the midst of a 7 year drought), Beijing, Vienna and Cluj (Romania). In Cluj, which is also suffering from drought, the Starbucks worker seemed confused by the running faucet: “We don’t know what it is. Nobody ever uses it.”

In the US, CBS television sent employees to Starbucks across the country– New York, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Los Angeles- and found the running water commonplace.

In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald questioned whether the policy was even legal in a city where water restrictions stipulate “no hoses or taps to be left running unattended, except when filling pools or containers”.

And in the Persian Gulf country of Bahrain where water is in short supply, environmentalist Mohammed Kadhim told the Gulf Daily News that Starbucks was taking advantage of the country’s subsidized water: “Starbucks is paying less than 10 per cent of water producing costs.”

Back in England, Professor Paul Eakins of Kings College London agreed, telling Channel 4: “If they’re wasting 23 million litres of water than it must be because they consider that the economic cost of that is not sufficient to cause them to save that kind of water and that says to me that we’re not charging enough for the water or for all the resources that go into purifying the water and we need to review that very urgently in order to stop waste of this kind”. 

The Starbucks response: wasting water to keep things clean 

Starbucks’ immediate reaction to the negative PR was defensive. The day the story broke (October 6th), a spokesperson for the company argued their setup was a sanitary necessity.

“The dipper well system currently in use in Starbucks retail stores ensures that we meet or exceed our own and local health standards.”

She added that “Starbucks’ challenge is to balance water conservation with the need for customer safety,” but the media and water conservation activists cried foul.

Peter Robinson, of Waste Watch, told The Sun: “Leaving taps running all day is a shocking waste of precious water. And to claim you are doing it for health and safety reasons is bonkers”.

Costa coffee’s green alternative: banging and swirling

The UK’s Channel 4 sent their science correspondent Tom Clarke to find out whether Starbucks truly needed to keep a tap running in order “to keep spoons and other utensils adequately clean”.

David Newsum from the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health told them that “this rinsing activity which by itself is very unlikely to kill very many bacteria“. He suggests a better solution to keeping cutlery sanitary: hot water and detergents or a dishwasher.

They also visited Starbucks’ competitor Costa Coffee to find out how they managed to keep their taps off. It turns out they use “a traditional Italian technique” of “banging and swirling” the milk froth in the coffee to avoid the need for spoons and constant rinsing.

Starbucks reacts… finally

After a few days of constant press, Starbucks shifted their stance and agreed there was a problem. “Starbucks fully recognizes that the dipper well system and the subsequent amount of water that is used by the system is an issue that needs immediate attention.”

On October 9th, they turned off the taps at all 57 Singapore locations, opting instead for dishwashers (the Spinelli’s coffee chain abandoned their dipper wells in their 23 Singapore stores the same day).

Singapore Environment Council director Howard Shaw said the old system was “a most unsatisfactory practice” that didn’t make sense. “Taps do not need to be left running all the time to prevent the accumulation of bacteria. Neither is it guaranteed that doing so will purge the bacteria from the pipes.”

On October 10th, Starbucks turned off their running faucets in stores worldwide and switched to a highly complicated “interim operational procedure”: washing spoons after use.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported that the coffee brewing giant has been testing dipper well alternatives since mid-2007. Apparently cleaning utensils is not as easy as it looks.

This new washing-spoons-after-use-technique had been undergoing tests in stores throughout China, and it only became company-wide policy last week because of consumer pressure.

Starbucks spokeswoman Tara Darrow admitted to the Seattle Post Intelligencer that their move away from the constantly running taps is “more in response to the feedback we’ve gotten from customers over the past few days”.

Corporate oversight or a calculated bet

It would be easy to assume that Starbucks’ water waste is a simple oversight for a company with 16,548 stores worldwide. But they have been using the dipper wells for over a decade and it turns out they were warned that this policy could lead to bad PR, at least two years ago. And they did nothing.

PRWeek reported this week that a major UK PR agency had warned Starbucks a couple years ago that its policy of leaving taps running constantly in all stores was “a potential PR disaster” and “a risk to its ethical position”.

The agency source told the publication: “We warned them several years ago that their usage of water was not good for their environmental credentials and could be a potential problem for them. They listened, but they didn’t do anything about it”.

Obviously, Starbucks felt that no one would notice that they were leaving water running in thousands of stores around the world. Or perhaps they just thought no one would say anything. They underestimated their customers.

And during an era of bloggers, youtube, a 24 hour news cycle and an increasingly eco-aware public, it took just one customer saying something to damage a very big company.