Starbucks consultant Peter Senge explains what's so complicated about a new cup.

In the world of sustainable marketing, few tales have grown as epic in scope as the redesign of the Starbucks cup. The coffee company seems to pursue its objective with the fervor of a moonshot;  an effort that started in 2008 isn’t supposed to wrap up until 2015, and the company says it’s behind schedule. What could be so complicated about refashioning a paper cylinder with a plastic lid?

At the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey on Tuesday, attendees learned just how far-reaching and complicated the effort has become. Starbucks wants to have 100 percent of its cups recyclable or reusable by 2015, with three sub-goals: complete a recyclable cup strategy by 2012, serve 25 percent of drinks in tumblers or permanent cups, and have front-of-store recycling in all stores owned by the company.

That’s ambitious enough, but a couple of presentations by Ben Packard, the head of corporate responsibility, and consultant Peter Senge of the MIT Sloan School of Management, made clear that along the way the project has turned into something much larger. Executives admit they have more questions than answers.

And if Starbucks is to be believed, it wants to transform not just the cup, but the materials used to make it, the process by which cups and lids are manufactured and recycled, and the role that customers play in the ritual of buying coffee.

Here are some insights from the conference:

Starbucks Recycles City by City. The company seems to have learned that, like politics, all recycling is local. Waste practices, haulers and rules vary by city and state, and Starbucks is in conversations with recyclers in the biggest cities that are most amenable to change. Customers in San Francisco and Seattle now have recyclable cups, Manhattan will have them by next month, and negotiations are underway in Chicago, Atlanta and Boston.

Old Materials in New Ways. The company has learned that most heavy-duty bottles in the U.S. are non-recyclable by design. Pure polypropylene is mixed with the dyes that make up a company’s colors and logo and then baked. This bastardizes the polypropylene,  making what would otherwise by a valuable and reusable substance into something that can only be shredded and made into lawn furniture. Senge suggested that Starbucks might spearhead an industry standard that would preserve the value of the polypropylene by instead producing a plain white vessel with a thin, customized overwrap.

Putting It Back on the Customer. Starbucks wants to retrain its customers to bring their own cups to the store, as 80 percent of customers walk out the door with a cup in their hand. The obvious corollary is the durable bags that customers are now growing accustomed to bringing to the grocery store. “How do we make the cup the grocery bag?” Packard asked. “How do we make it the responsible choice?” On one day in April, Starbucks tried the “stunt” (Ben’s words) of giving a free cup of coffee to anyone who brought in their own tumbler.

First Contact Across Industries. Also in April, Starbucks held its second annual “Cup Summit” with paper manufacturers, suppliers, waste haulers and recyclers. It took Starbucks’ muscle to make it happen; Packard said that these meetings marked the first time that International Paper had ever sat down with leaders of the recycling industry to talk about the cradle-to-grave journey of any product, including a cup.

Let’s hope that the end result is a lot less waste, or perhaps none, from the world’s best-known coffee company. Too bad it will take until nearly the end of the second Obama administration for it to happen.

How Starbucks Strives for a Better Cup is a post from: The Ferris Files

Top News:

On Saturday, Apple’s long-awaited iPad emerged to great fanfare, and with it some schwag and a initial smattering of green apps.

Wising Up to the Smart Grid: After years of talk and speculation, several big U.S. companies revealed that the smart grid lies at the center of their business plans. At the New York Auto Show, Ford and Microsoft announced energy-management software designed for the thousands of people who will plug in their electric cars or hybrids at home.  Connecticut Light & Power applied for permission to scrap its flat-rate price structure in favor of one that penalizes customers for overloading the grid. Under the proposal, Connecticut electricity would be ten times cheaper at night than it would be in the middle of the day, when the A/C units are cranking.

Also, Google spearheaded a lobbying effort, joined by Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Comcast and other firms poised to make a mint from the smart grid. In a letter to President Obama, they asked for the government to “democratize access to energy” by tilting regulations in favor of energy networking.

Do the Right Thing: Starbucks, in an effort to make all of its cups recyclable or reusable by 2015, asked coffee-drinkers everywhere to crowdsource the solution. Target announced it would place recycling centers at the entrances to each of its 1,740 stores, and the board at Intel voted to make “corporate responsibility and sustainability performance” part of its corporate charter.

Meanwhile, the foodmaking giant ConAgra, maker of Chef Boyardee and Orville Redenbacher and a longtime laggard in acknowledging global warming, promised to make big cuts to its carbon emissions, water use, solid waste and packaging by 2015.

Traffic Jam in the Luxury Lane: So many carmakers are preparing high-end hybrids that dealerships in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor might get a little crowded. Hyundai said it would produce a six-speed, powerful Sonata Hybrid Bluedrive in 2011. Nissan’s luxe brand, Infiniti, announced the M35 Hybrid, while Mercedes hinted that its entire S class line of large sedans may go hybrid. Auto dealers reacted with dismay, worried that their customers would rather drive fast than save a few bucks on gas.

Troubled Waters: China’s neighbors questioned if China’s dam-building binge might be contributing to the biggest drop in water levels on the Mekong River in decades. In the U.S., researchers discovered that waterways from the Colorado River to the Potomac are steadily getting warmer, especially near cities, with unknown impacts on river health.

The Latest Inspiring Inventions: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory created an LED with a green tint — not the ethic, but the actual color — and opened up whole new uses for the brave little bulb. Marine scientists got a better look at tiny sea life with high-definition audio, and the propellerheads at MIT made a leap forward in lithium-air batteries.

The Weekly: Obama Drills, the Grid Lobby Powers Up, ConAgra Sees the Light is a post from: The Ferris Files

Isn’t that weird?

Try to imagine a parallel from the world of products. It would be like a publisher printing a novel so its pages had the look and feel of newspaper. Or modeling a nice new house on a double-wide trailer home, with faux wood paneling and a cheap aluminum screen door. (If you can think of other examples, real or imaginary, let me know.)

Why would anyone make such a thing? Why would anyone buy it?

I asked the woman at the checkout counter whether people were buying. She nodded. “We had to put up another column of them just yesterday,” she said.

I circled back around to the display and held one. I have to admit it felt comfortingly familiar to handle, since as far as I can tell it’s a virtual copy of the Starbucks cup I have held in my hand hundreds of times. It even had a fake little insulating jacket.

The Eco-First Travel Mug, as its called, is made by Copco, a company that started making teapots in the 1960s and now is also a major purveyor of travel mugs. Someone at Copco must have gotten a raise for coming up with such a simple and brazen rip-off.

After all, Starbucks and its fellow coffee-sellers have already done the hard work of figuring out exactly what people want in a commuter cup. Teams of caffeinated specialists in Seattle engineered the cup bottom so it would fit any car cupholder, and designed the cup lip perfectly to the human lip, and gauged the insulating sleeve so it would fit for the best grip. No need to redesign what’s already been done.

Starbucks is trying to create an “Eco-Cup” of its own, having set a goal of a creating a recyclable cup by 2012 and making all of its cups (2.7 billion a year) recyclable by 2015. The company also encourages customers to bring their own mugs. Someone at Starbucks HQ is probably stomping mad that a competitor was the first to realize that the customer simply wants a Starbucks cup – made of plastic.

The surprising lesson I learn from the Eco-First cup is how deep and intimate our relationship is with throwaway food containers. I knew we used lots of disposables, but I didn’t know we loved them so much that the best way to make us leave them is to make a knockoff. A higher-quality knockoff. Trash has become the comforting staple of our lives.

I see a whole new generation of eco-products based on the trashy offenders of the past. Food clamshells with the smooth texture of Styrofoam. Water glasses with the waxy finish of Dixie cups.

But wait, that day is already here. Someone has already figured out how to make the iconic red beer cup and the white paper plate – out of ceramics!

Special  thanks to Mohi Kumar for helping to flesh out the ideas in this post.

Haven’t I Seen You at Starbucks? is a post from: The Ferris Files