Starbucks – A Conundrum in Socially Responsible Marketing

It can’t be easy being in the brand marketing department at Starbucks. As a business that built itself on being a socially responsible company, with an equal emphasis on healthy people, healthy planet and healthy profits, their socially responsible marketing strategy success has also created a mountain of daily waste, of which they don’t currently have a solution.

It turns out that every year, 58 billion paper cups are used in the U.S. at restaurants, events and homes – many of which individually are attributable to one of the over 11,000 Starbucks stores located in the U.S.

To understand the magnitude of the problem, according to Global Green USA, if all paper cups in the U.S. were recycled, 645,000 tons of waste would be diverted from landfills each year, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 million mtCO2e, equivalent to removing 450,000 passenger cars from the road.

Starbucks Recycling Challenge

Starbucks has acknowledged the problem and is now sponsoring a crowd-sourcing activity (called the Betacup Challenge) with a reward of $ 20,000 to the winning solution who can redesign the popular to-go cup. Starbucks also conducted a pilot program in New York City in Fall 2009 in seven stores to test the collection and recycling of coffee cups when combined with old corrugated cardboard (OCC), the most extensively recycled material in the United States. With Starbucks’s publicly-stated goal of having 100% of Starbucks cups either being be reusable or recyclable by 2015, there’s a lot on the line for this socially responsible business.

Betacup from the betacup on Vimeo.

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing and social responsibility campaign development, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.

Tags: betacup challenge, recycling challenge, socially responsible marketing, Starbucks