【2023 Starbucks Earth Day】More Than Just Free Starbucks Coffee, There Are Meaningful Things to Do!

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat official account: cafe_style)

For more specialty coffee beans, please add the private WeChat of FrontStreet Coffee, WeChat ID: qjcoffeex

Do you know what day April 22nd is?

"I know, I know, Earth Day!" No! It's the release date of Starbucks' annual blockbuster - "Attack of the Giant Cup: Pots, Pans, and Water Buckets Filled with Coffee."

To respond to this festival established for global environmental protection, Starbucks has been offering free medium-sized (355ml) drip coffee beverages on April 22nd since 2015, but you need to bring your own Starbucks travel mug/marker cup to encourage consumers to support environmental protection. When the event was first launched, the response was moderate because it required using cups purchased from Starbucks. By 2016, the event content was to buy coffee with your own cup and receive free coffee grounds... which could be said to have absolutely no appeal to consumers...

So two years later, on April 22nd, 2017, Starbucks changed its strategy - as long as everyone brought their own cup, they could get a designated medium-sized beverage within a specified time. Just bring your own cup?! Without any regulations on cup material/type/shape/capacity, netizens immediately rummaged through their homes for any container that could hold liquid and rushed to Starbucks...

By 2018, they introduced products made from Tyvek paper. And on Earth Day 2019, you could also get a designated medium-sized beverage within a specified time by bringing your own cup.

However, starting from 2020, you had to grab coupons in the livestream room the day before Earth Day to have a chance to get a free medium-sized oat milk latte the next day. Regarding the operation of needing to grab coupons, netizens expressed that Starbucks was stingy, while Starbucks' reply was: refuse to gather.

In 2021, you also needed to join challenge activities to unlock the opportunity to get free medium-sized designated products with your own cup. For this reason, netizens began to lose interest in Earth Day activities and asked: Is the free coffee on Earth Day still available?

Since from 2019 to 2021, the Earth Day activities could not attract more consumers to participate enthusiastically like in 2017. So in 2022, Starbucks brought back the "use your own cup to get a designated medium-sized beverage within a specified time" event.

After a 5-year hiatus, netizens went even crazier!! The level of craziness even rushed to the top of the trending list!

So orderly? No! No! No! This is the official event scene photo released by Starbucks, but the actual situation was like this:

Water buckets, kettles, thermos bottles... all came out! There were also plus-sized goblets, filled with 355ml of iced Americano, showing elegance.

Of course, no matter how large the pots, pans, bottles, and jars were, Starbucks would only give 355ml of coffee. If you see a very large container that can "return fully loaded," it's 100% bought by the netizens themselves!

Okay, back to the main topic. After watching this, do you still remember what Starbucks' bring-your-own-cup event was for?

"Remember! Earth Day is coming in a few days! I've already prepared my pots and pans!" No! It's "Protect the environment, everyone has responsibility." (Everyone should bring containers with appropriate capacity~)

Free is not the point, don't forget the original intention of "environmental protection"

If you only care about that free cup of black coffee, then you really haven't grasped Starbucks' intention well. Don't forget, the big premise of being able to get a free cup on April 22nd - bringing your own cup.

April 22nd is "World Earth Day," a festival for environmentalists worldwide and an environmental protection publicity day. On this day, people of different nationalities promote and practice the concept of environmental protection in different ways. The earliest Earth Day activities were environmental movements that emerged on American campuses in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, this activity spread from the United States to the world. As one of the large American enterprises, Starbucks naturally actively participates in it.

In addition to World Earth Day, Starbucks China also participated in the "Earth Hour" environmental protection activity.

What Starbucks mainly advocates in the free coffee drinking event on World Earth Day is the environmental concept of achieving recyclability and reducing plastic straws by bringing your own cup. Therefore, the participation condition for the event is that those who come to get coffee need to bring their own cups.

In addition, starting today, nearly 1,000 Starbucks stores in Shenzhen and Shanghai as well as the专星送 platform will stop providing plastic straws, and instead use specially developed drink-through lids that can replace plastic straws. If straws are needed, more environmentally friendly paper straws will be provided.

Coffee is delicious, but very environmentally unfriendly?

In the coffee industry, advocating for environmental protection is not a one-day or two-day matter. In fact, the process from coffee planting to making beverages that enter our mouths contains many aspects that are not environmentally friendly.

For example, in cultivation, coffee (especially Arabica varieties) generally has low yields and is easily affected by pests. In the 1990s, farmers who focused solely on yield used large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides, which affected the Earth's ecosystem, gradually depleted natural resources due to overuse, and consequently began to lower coffee quality. The large consumption of water resources during coffee bean processing is also a reflection of insufficient environmental protection.

The coffee we drink daily also contains factors that pollute the Earth - large amounts of non-degradable plastic products, such as cups, straws, and coffee capsule shells used in capsule machines, as well as remaining coffee grounds.

However, fortunately, both coffee producers and we who drink coffee have noticed these practical problems and launched multiple measures. The drink-through lids mentioned in Starbucks China's event this time have been promoted worldwide, while Nestlé, a major instant coffee player, has also changed the capsule coffee shells to all-aluminum, which can be recycled infinitely.

In addition to these large enterprises, many companies also reuse coffee grounds, from the more familiar use as fertilizer to making batteries and even clothes, which can be described as a variety of technological and creative ideas. And what about us coffee lovers? Very simple! Use fewer plastic straws when drinking coffee outside, and bring your own cups for takeout - that's a good environmental action!

Clothes made from coffee grounds

After getting that free cup of coffee in the morning, will everyone continue to bring their own travel cups when buying coffee outside in the future?

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473