Starbucks are about to need some of our reputation management services after it was revealed they have a policy of leaving a cold tap running non stop in every store.
This means they waste 23 million litres of water every single day.
By the end of the week a search for “starbucks” isn’t going to look very good.
The bizarre policy, which is aimed at preventing germs developing in the taps in its 10,000 stores worldwide, has outraged environmental groups.
Every Starbucks branch has a cold tap behind the counter providing water for a sink called a “dipper well” used for washing spoons and utensils and the staff are banned from turning the water off under “health and safety rules”, an investigation claims.
In a letter to a customer who complained about the waste, a Starbucks executive revealed that a constant flow stops breeding in the taps.
It means that 23.4 million litres of water – enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 83 minutes or sustain the population of drought-hit Namibia – is wasted every day.
What puzzles me is how not one person at Starbucks realised that this policy might at some stage blow up spectacularly in their faces?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
How exactly is it ‘wasted’ when it goes straight back down the drain and gets recycled. Obviously some will get lost during the process, but I should imagine a large percentage ends back up in the water system. I guess the waste is the cost of cleaning this clean water again.
@Joe
Strictly speaking what is wasted is the energy that was expended in harvesting the water, cleaning it and transporting it to the coffee shop in question.
Of course this energy is not actually lost since the law of conservation of energy states we can’t destroy energy (we just convert it into a state that is harder to use).
But lots of fossil fuels need to be burned to supply clean water to a Starbucks. So pouring it straight away is, let’s face it, bad news.
I’m not that big of a fan of Starbucks. I think it is going to be very interesting to watch them as their business model erodes during bad economic times.
Lets all boycott starbucks for week and the money we usually spend on their coffee we should donate to a country that needs water, and after the week we should continue to boycott them and spend our money in another coffee shops instead.
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