Featured Company - Starbucks

Starbucks' "Green" Efforts

Starbucks focuses much of its corporate responsibility effort on the environment.

The company seeks LEED certification for individual retail stores and is working with the Green Building Council on a pilot program for a volume retail certification system. The company’s corporate offices in Seattle attained one of the agency’s highest levels of certification—the largest and oldest building in the country to earn the honor, Hoots notes.

Outside of the United States, Starbucks looked at its coffee sources and developed Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E) Practices, a system of evaluating coffee farmers, processors and exporters. Under C.A.F.E. Practices, suppliers must meet a number of requirements regarding product quality, economic accountability and transparency, social responsibility and environmental leadership. 

Percolating minds—Cindy Hoots, Starbucks Global Responsibility program manager, works on an art project with children as part of the company’s Guatemala Education Initiative. Starbucks is educating young Guatemalan children in an effort to help coffee-growing communities rise above poverty.

 “We wanted to source high-quality coffee that is environmentally and socially responsible,” Hoots says.

Starbucks paired up with Earthwatch International to send teams of researchers and volunteers to evaluate C.A.F.E. Practices in action in major coffee-farming regions. Environmental Science faculty member John Banks has led several of these trips to Costa Rica to study biodiversity of insects and plants in coffee fields, research that will eventually help Starbucks and its coffee growers determine if a more diverse ecosystem leads to higher-quality coffee. Although there’s no connection between his research and the Center for Leadership and Social Responsibility, Banks’s work is a prime example of a major company tapping into UW Tacoma’s expertise.

“As a large company, we do get criticism around our sourcing,” Hoots says. “When this research is finished, we’ll be able to have scientific proof that what we’re doing is working. It’s important to have some sort of measurement.”