Recently Starbucks hit the news for wasting water – 23.4 million litres of water a day to be exact. If I am not wrong, someone actually made a calculation and came up with the estimation that this means they can refill an Olympic-size pool several times in an hour or something.
I am appalled that Starbucks is wasting that much water. Please note that while 70% of our water is covered with water, only 2.59% of that is freshwater [1].
And the drinkable water is unevenly distributed and shared by other land animals and plants, and also industrial and agricultural usage. And if this hasn’t been obvious to you in the past, that is why certain parts of the world are suffering from water shortages. Not to mention some of this water is now so polluted that we can no longer drink it without processing it first.
Here in Singapore, we go through much pain to ensure a steady supply of fresh water. At times, that even become an international dispute with our neighbouring country up north. Other example of international disputes over water involves Israel and Jordan, and also China and India. In fact, it is also rumored that the civilisation that built Angkor Wat collapsed as a result of water management failures. (You can read up some of that in Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.)
Now, water management is not the only point in Professor Diamond’s book on sustainable use of our planet’s resources. Thus, while Starbucks should get the boos for wasting water, let’s also look at what Starbucks has done right in being environmental friendly:
- Grounds for your Garden: A year round program that gives leftover coffee grounds to anyone requesting it for composting, though not all stores and regions participate.
- Reducing the size of their paper napkins and reducing the size of their store garbage bags: Reduced over 1.8 million pounds of solid waste in 2004 alone.
- Paper napkins made of recycled paper: Just take a look at them when you take one. There’s a fine print that says no bleach was used in its production. Now that’s one less chemical being dumped into the rivers.
- Recycled content in food packaging for Starbucks coffee cups: First-ever to be granted by U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- Gets all of their coffee beans from farms: Ensures that farmers are not negatively affecting the environment while producing coffee beans for Starbucks.
Most, if not all of the above facts are found here.
Now, this is not an article to justify Starbucks. But are you aware of the above environmentally friendly measures Starbucks have taken? In fact, when you bash Starbucks, have you also check up on some of the environmentally unfriendly conduct of certain allegedly ‘green’ companies? For e.g. In one of HP’s LCD product, there is a label that says something to this effect: Dispose carefully, lamp contains mercury. On top of that, just how environmentally friendly are the million of iPods sold all over the world, when they are all made of plastics? Also, there is a rumor that Apple will be producing laptops made of aluminum – a non-renewable resource that is mined from the Earth. Will anyone be making a lot of noise about that?
So, while Starbucks should do something about this water issue and maybe even do more to improve it’s environmental record, why are we letting some of the others go scot free?
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