Here's Your Chance to Ask Starbucks "What's Up with the Cup?"

Starbucks invites you to join a live online conversation about the company’s efforts to make its cups recyclable.

[social_buttons] Imagine… you’re in a Starbucks enjoying your double tall, soy latte and chatting with a close friend. You finish your beverage, and get up to throw away your soiled paper cup. But there is no recycling bin. You feel guilty just tossing your cup into the trash so it ends up in some landfill some where. Doesn’t Starbucks know that 58 billion paper coffee cups are thrown away, unrecycled, each year? The company continues to promote its environmental initiatives so where are the recycling bins in the stores? It seems pretty simple to me or am I missing something?

This is an all too common scenario for the coffee giant. The company recognizes the waste it creates with its 2.7 billion paper coffee cups every year and has begun to take steps to find the elusive, fully-recyclable cup. Starbucks is sponsoring the Betacup Challenge and works with Global Green USA to pilot several recycling programs.

In fact, Starbucks Environmental Impact director, Jim Hanna, is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology right now getting ready to lead the coffee company’s second Cup Summit. The two-day symposium brings municipalities, raw material suppliers, cup manufacturers, retail and beverage businesses, recyclers, NGOs, and academic experts together to drive the development of comprehensive recycling solutions.

And now, Starbucks wants you to join in the conversation. Here is your chance to ask the world’s largest coffee chain your pressing questions. Here are the details:

How

  • Visit Starbucks on Facebook and Twitter for information about Starbucks recycling efforts
  • Follow @StarbucksLive on Twitter for frequent updates from the cup summit
  • Use #cupsummit2010 to submit questions via Twitter for the live online conversation

Who

  • Jim Hanna, Starbucks director of Environmental Impact, will be fielding your questions
  • Peter Senge, senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning

When

So why is Starbucks doing this? According to the company,

“Starbucks goal is to ensure 100 percent of our cups are reusable or recyclable by 2015. One of the most significant challenges we currently face is a variance in local recycling capabilities. Starbucks wants to give environmentally conscious consumers an opportunity to ask questions and learn more about this complex issue.”

There you go! If you are passionate about this issue, get involved. I know I will be listening.

Follow Cindy Tickle on Twitter @ethicalbiz
Image Credit: MyNameMattersNot via flickr under CC license

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