It Takes A Village - Using Systems Thinking to Solve Starbucks Recyclable Cup Initiative

Starbucks Coffee Company sells approximately four billion single-serve (disposable) cups globally each year.  Across the retail industry, approximately 500 billion single-serve cups are sold annually.  In the vast majority of communities, these cups are destined for landfill at end-of-life, generally due to lack of market demand for the product (designated as post-consumer poly-coated paper stock and post-consumer thermoformed polypropylene) within the recycling industry.

 In 2009, Starbucks set an ambitious goal that all of our single-serve cups would be recyclable or reusable by 2015.  Unlike a number of recent marketing campaigns, we do not define “recyclable” based on any particular material that comprises the components of our cups, but rather on our customers’ actual access to recycling services in the places where they choose to dispose of the cups. This includes within Starbucks stores, in residential locations, offices and public spaces. This definition of recyclable is consistent with the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, which indicate that a product should not be called recyclable unless a significant majority of users have readily-available access to recycling service for the product.

 Starbucks engaged the assistance of Peter Senge and his team of systems experts at MIT to define the boundaries of the lifecycle of our cups and engage the stakeholders from the entire value chain to develop a systems-based set of solutions to test and, ultimately scale, to create the necessary market drivers to achieve our 2015 goal. At the second of two “cup summits” to date, held most recently at MIT in April 2010, stakeholders including raw material suppliers, primary manufacturers, retailers (including a number of Starbucks competitors) municipal regulators, recyclers, secondary manufacturers and NGOs gathered to understand the impact and often unintended consequences of their individual decisions on the entire system, break down silo thinking, and formulate a series of tests to begin creating the necessary market pull to successfully incorporate used cups from all retailers into their business models.

 This discussion will provide an overview and deep dive into Starbucks cup recycling initiative, in the context of using our example for a broader discussion of the unintended consequences of failing to incorporate systems thinking into raw material selection, manufacturing design, purchasing decisions, marketing and policy development.

 Although spending time focusing on paper cups may seem trivial in the face of the massive environmental challenges confronting the planet, it is the goal of this discussion to also demonstrate the important role of public perception of where the greatest environmental impacts lie in driving (or inhibiting) one’s ability to effectively impact these greater challenges.