Giving Compass' Take:

• Starbucks claims it will reduce its footprint compared to 2018, send half as much waste to landfills, and conserve half of its water, but they haven't given a deadline to when this will happen. 

• How will stakeholders hold Starbucks accountable for achieving this goal? 

• Here's an article on how Starbucks banned plastic straws. 

Starbucks announced today that it wants to become “resource-positive”: Storing more carbon than it emits, eliminating waste, and providing more clean freshwater than it uses in coffee-growing regions or in its direct operations.

It’s a worthy goal—but the company hasn’t set itself a deadline, saying instead that it’s a “multi-decade aspiration.” By 2030, it now has preliminary goals to cut emissions in its operations and supply chain in half compared to its footprint in 2018 (even as it grows), send half as much waste to landfill from its stores and manufacturing, and conserve or replenish half of the water that it uses. And it argues that the long-term vision to benefit the environment is necessary.

“I think that the significance of ‘resource positive’ is a recognition on the part of Starbucks, that we not only need to mitigate or reduce our footprint, our impacts, but we really need to help reverse the degradation,” says Michael Kobori, the company’s new chief sustainability officer, who previously held the same role at Levi Strauss. “The crisis that the planet is in is impacting people, is impacting our customers, is impacting our partners, and is impacting farmers who grow our coffee all around the world and their communities. So it’s not going to be enough to simply reduce our own footprint. Our long-term vision is we’ve got to reverse that.”

The company is not new to sustainability; it set new standards for sourcing responsibly grown coffee in 2005, now has more than 1,600 LEED-certified stores, runs its U.S. stores on renewable electricity, and donates climate-resilient trees to coffee farmers. It’s spent more than a decade trying to solve the problem of coffee cup waste (with relatively little progress, though after its latest cup redesign challenge, it’s now beginning to test recyclable, compostable options).

Read the full article about Starbucks' going 'resource-positive' by Adele Peters at Fast Company.