Starbucks is planning to make their iconic coffee cup a thing of the past, at least in its current disposable incarnation.
The coffee company is looking for ways to reduce its carbon footprint even further, having already instituted initiatives that did away with plastic straws and promoted non-dairy milk. Now it’s angling towards a way to eliminate the waste related to customers chucking the receptacles that deliver their world-renowned beverages.
In a statement released Tuesday, Starbucks announced their latest goal: for each of their customers worldwide to use a “personal or Starbucks-provided reusable cup for every visit” by 2025. The benchmark for their locations in the United States and Canada is a year earlier.
The coffee chain is testing out a number of programs to make this goal a reality, including one called “Borrow a Cup.” This program gives each customer a reusable cup branded with the Starbucks logo with incentives for those customers to return those cups to the store they came from for a professional cleaning and a return to the store’s cup rotation.
Another program encourages customers to bring a cup from home or use a cup provided by the store for use in-house before returning it, as one would at a sit-down restaurant. Already in place in South Korea, that plan saved 200,000 cups from the garbage in just three months.
Incentives for customers to buy into the new green protocols, Starbucks plans to offer discounts, promotions and washing stations for customers to clean their reusable cups.
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