Everything but the Coffee (27 page)

Reverend Jeffrey preached at Roberts’s funeral and promised that this man would not lose his life in vain. He called on city leaders to act. But how, he wondered, could he get them to hear him? Seattle police had shot other black men, and members of the black community had protested; yet nothing changed. Over the years, Jeffrey had led marches, registered voters, and pushed for more opportunities for black businesses. But still, he believed, the police shot first and talked later. How could he change things? This time he would try something different. He called for a boycott of Starbucks.

“Huh?” wondered many in Seattle and around the country. Why Starbucks? What did the company, famous for its local charity work, commitment to diversity, and good deeds, have to do with Roberts’s death or the police? Not much and a whole lot, Jeffrey and his allies answered. “We’re not asking them [Starbucks] for money,” explained Dustin Washington, a Jeffrey’s associate. “We’re not saying they haven’t done things for the community. All we’re saying is that as partners in the community, they have a corporate responsibility to demand police accountability.” He continued, “We’ve protested. We’ve marched. We’ve begged. We’ve written letters. What else is there for us to do? We’re asking the people who control money to support the people.” Jeffrey echoed this point: “We are tired of begging. We are citizens of this city, and if we don’t get what we want, we know how to get it.” He added on another occasion, “Since our votes are not getting us what we need, we need to see if where we spend our money can.”
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Clarifying the boycott’s logic, Jeffrey elaborated, “These corporations drive public policy, and politicians are in the middle. And just dealing with the poor guy
in the middle doesn’t cut it anymore. We’ve got to start dealing directly with the corporations that want our business.”
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More than anything, a diminished sense of efficacy and declining faith in local democracy fueled Jeffrey’s shifting civil rights tactics. The minister’s call for a Starbucks boycott suggests a more far-reaching rearrangement in power—one that commentators concerned with the rise of neoliberalism, from Benjamin Barber to David Harvey to Naomi Klein, have noted. “We must confront” corporations, Klein urged in her book and call to arms,
No Logo
, in 2002, “because that is where the power is.” In the actions of Jeffrey and, even more, the legions of twenty-something media-savvy antiglobalization protesters, Klein heard the ramblings of a new political surge that called multinational brands and corporations to task, often playfully reworking their logos and messages into potent anti-market, pro-producer, pro-civic society protest symbols.

But the movement she imagined either has quieted down or is still gaining momentum somewhere on the fringes. While it runs its course, something else is happening. In some ways, it is the opposite of what Klein had hoped would happen. In many cases, though not all, the brands have taken political dissent and the broader desire for change, and folded these impulses right back into more consumption.
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In this neoliberal moment, politics and government seem to many almost irrelevant, and elected leaders seem incapable or unwilling to make serious change. Sensing this perception and acknowledging the free-flowing power of capital, protesters like Jeffrey decided to focus on the corporations rather than governments to get things done. Less engaged citizens started to feel this way, too. Like Jeffrey, they genuinely want solutions to big, complex problems like global warming. But if government no longer seems as relevant or powerful, where can they turn? (Again, Obama may, perhaps, prompt new questions and new answers. Perhaps.)

Brands like Starbucks have stepped in to fill the void. They promise to solve the problems their customers want solved. Unlike protest movements, like the one Jeffrey tried to start, the companies don’t ask patrons
to give up anything or do the hard work of education or organization. All change-seeking customers need to do is buy, and the corporations will handle the rest. While Starbucks didn’t do anything for Jeffrey (company representatives didn’t even meet with him—perhaps he didn’t represent a big enough market share or maybe meeting his demands would set a dangerous precedent and align the company with the wrong group), it did promise to answer Al Gore’s more popular challenge to make the world greener. Actually, it had been doing that for a long time, even before earth-first thinking got hip.

On this front and others, Starbucks not only promised to do what governments used to do but also started to act like a government. In 1990, the company issued a mission statement that, like a constitution, laid out its “guiding principles.” Number five (out of ten, a number invoking, of course, the Bill of Rights) pledges that Starbucks will “contribute positively to our communities and our environment.” “Help us help the planet,” it reiterates on every cup and every java jacket. With this promise, Starbucks vowed to fulfill its customers’ green desires, the same ones detected by the Cone consumer survey. Yet all too often its promises have turned out more hollow than whole. Still, for many the promises are enough. They get their coffee to go just like they want it, and they get to think of themselves as part of the solution, not the problem. What they really get, and what Starbucks really sells, is not so much answers but a washing of the hands, what I would call innocence by association.

STARBUCKS’ FOOTPRINT

A cartoon a few years ago pictured a man in a suit in line at an upscale coffee shop. He looks back at the woman behind him and scoffs, “I’m too busy to make my own coffee.”
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Apparently so are a lot of us these days, or at least we want to look like we are too busy to make our own coffee, and we carry these attitudes and their impact on us out the door in paper cups.

All buying decisions—ours and those of the companies we buy from—are environmental decisions. Everything we purchase comes from somewhere and ends up somewhere. It takes energy to get the goods to the store and to get rid of what’s left when we are done. What we do on both ends leaves a mark on the environment.

Starbucks promises that buying its coffee represents a good decision for us and for the planet. The company claims that we can have it all— convenience and a limited environmental impact; business as usual and an end to global warming; getting what we want, how we want it, and showing that we care. But can we really have it all with no costs some-where for someone?

Over the last decade, coffeehouses—led by Starbucks—have sprung up everywhere. We aren’t, however, drinking appreciably more coffee. According to industry surveys, overall coffee consumption in the United States has increased, but only slightly over the last twenty years and mostly among younger consumers. Yet we do drink more espresso-based drinks (the kind that require expensive equipment and training to make and are best consumed at a coffee shop) and more specialty, high-end coffee (coffee that takes skill to procure and make correctly).
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Clearly, the coffee trend is part of several larger, more generalized trends toward the selling of affordable expertise, luxury, and status making and the explosive expansion of takeaway food culture. With more people working and commuting, we are busier than ever, and we drink more coffee outside the home, on the run. This is the growth sector of the business. Since 1990, as a result, retail coffee beverage sales have tripled, from $30 billion to $90 billion each year.
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In the United States, most of this coffee comes in to-go cups. Between 60 to 80 percent of Starbucks customers, more in the cities than the suburbs, and more in the mornings than in the afternoons, grab and go. That means our desire for coffee generates lots of waste: millions of pounds in paper and plastic cups, plastic lids, napkins, sugar packets, and stirrers. That’s just the beginning of the trash—the beginning of the environmental footprint that our collective desire for high-end, take-away coffee leaves behind.

•  •  •

To find out more about Starbucks and its trash, I called Elizabeth Royte, an investigative journalist who works her own environmental beat. In 2000, Royte tracked her trash as part of a clever and perceptive book,
Garbage Land
.
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She tagged along—literally—behind a Fig Newton wrapper and a discarded computer. The trips took her to dark lagoons off Queens, sanitation stations in Staten Island, and bleak landfills in eastern Pennsylvania.

How could I measure Starbucks’ environmental imprint, I asked Royte over the phone. I knew from books I had read that intensive, corporateled coffee cultivation stripped away shade trees, endangered wildlife, and contaminated the water supply with the runoff from chemical fertilizers. But I wanted to know more about the costs of consuming Starbucks in the United States. What did our desires for lattes take from others?

“Start with water,” Royte said.

Coffee, she pointed out, is made up mostly of water. So Starbucks uses prodigious amounts of water. But it is not just water to make coffee. It’s also water to clean spatulas, knives, espresso machines, floors, coffee filter holders, windows, and toilets. After making Frappuccinos, the baristas have to wash out the blenders. Each Starbucks, at least in England, I learned after talking to Royte, has a cold tap that runs into a sink, known as a “dipper well.” It is used to wash utensils. According to the
Guardian
newspaper, under company guidelines, management won’t allow staff to turn the water off, ever, because it claims that a constant flow of water prevents germs and other bacteria from breeding. Green activists say that this policy wastes enough water to fill an Olympic-size pool every eighty-three minutes and to take care of two million people in drought-starved Namibia for a year.
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At the same time, Starbucks uses literally tons of paper, which in turn, requires lots of water. According to industry reports, it takes three thousand gallons of water to make ten thousand sixteen-ounce paper coffee cups. With its forty-four to fifty million weekly customers, that means Starbucks consumes
around ten thousand gallons of water an hour to provide cups for its to-go customers.

The paper cups themselves are just the beginning of the paper trail. Coffeehouse customers use napkins, toilet paper, paper towels, small bags, stirrers, trays for carrying more than one drink, and plates for pastries, cheese and crackers, and lunches. Behind the counter, as Royte explained, there were more paper products. The cups, for instance, arrive in cardboard boxes with thick cardboard separators. Because Starbucks relies on so few local products or vendors, everything comes in boxes. All the paper products plus the bags of coffee, boxes of tea, bottles of vanilla and hazelnut syrup, CDs, books, muffins, bagels, biscotti, and breath mints all come in boxes, often with dividers. Using all of these paper products for our coffee translates into lots of water use. It also leaves behind lots of hard-to-deal-with paper-based trash.

Starbucks and its customers don’t use just paper; they consume sheets and sheets of plastic, too. All drinks come with plastic lids, and employees serve all of the cold drinks in clear plastic cups. Before they get to the stores, the lids and cups get wrapped in another coat of protective plastic, which comes, by the way, in cardboard boxes with cardboard dividers. Same with the filters for the coffee—they also come in boxes separated by dividers and wrapped in plastic. The CDs come wrapped in plastic. The milk jugs—and each store must go through thousands of them each year— are nothing but plastic. “Plastic,” Royte made clear, “isn’t easy to get rid of.” It doesn’t decompose; it just sits in the landfill if it isn’t recycled.

Plastics raised not just the issue of disposal but also the issue of oil: all plastic products come from oil—specifically, petroleum. Starbucks’ dependence on plastics for its liners, wrappers, milk jugs, lids, and cold drink cups links the company, and us as its consumers, not just to piles of trash and loads of pollutants but also to vexing global politics stretching from Iraq to Israel to Russia to Venezuela and back to the United States.

In 2005, traffic engineers from the nation’s capital pointed out to a
Washington Post
reporter an emerging “Starbucks effect.” Many latte drinkers, they noted, drove out of their way each morning to get their fix,
probably in takeaway cups. That mileage quickly adds up. Think about it: if you drive four or five miles every day for a Starbucks drink, you would need to buy an additional seventy to one hundred gallons of gas per year per car, even more for SUVs and trucks. All of the additional driving also produced noticeable spikes in highway congestion and air pollution and further entangled the nation in the knotty global politics of oil.
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Royte told me that around the same time that the
Post
report came out, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey found persistent and elevated traces of caffeine—another form of trash—in the nation’s waterways.

“How did it get there?” I asked.

“When we drink coffee,” Royte chuckled, “we pee, and that goes into the water supply.”

As we finished talking, she gave me clear instructions for the next phase of my research: “You’ve got to get the trash. See what’s there.”

This is easier said than done. I used to talk with Ben, the manager of the Starbucks outlet on Temple University’s main campus, fairly often. But I just couldn’t get up the nerve to ask him for his store’s trash. I knew he might say yes, and then he would have to ask a district manager or some other higher-up. Then the questions would start, and six months later, someone in Seattle would say no. That is, in fact, what happened, except I kept Ben out of it. I made an official request to a Starbucks representative to comb through a few of the company’s bags of trash. “You asked if you could spend time going through the trash at one of our stores,” Audrey Lincoff, then vice president of global brand communications, explained to me in an e-mail. “It would be disruptive to the store’s operation to execute what you’re asking.”
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After this rebuff, I tried to contact a store manger I knew and had interviewed a couple of times, hoping he might give me some trash to look at on the sly, but he had taken another job by that time. I started stealing long peeks in store trash cans, noting what I saw, but this wasn’t the same as getting the bags, as Royte reminded me in a subsequent e-mail. “You need to get the trash and go through it!” she wrote.