Opinion: Can NYU's Starbucks Please Accept Personal Cups?
Customers at the Starbucks on West Fourth Street order their beverages without the possibility of using a reusable cup from home.
The Starbucks on West Fourth Street and University Place– everyone knows it, most love it, and few frequent it as much as I do. It’s convenient, helps put you in a seasonal mood with drinks like iced sugar cookie lattes, and it’s the best place to spend dining dollars in the first three weeks of school. There’s been one glaring problem for me, though, and it’s the fact that this particular Starbucks does not take reusable cups.
Although it may sound like a trivial issue at first, needless plastic waste, from every source, is a serious environmental crisis. More than 16 billion Starbucks cups are thrown away every year and 1.6 million trees are razed to make these cups. With over eight million tons of plastic entering the ocean annually (enough to outnumber fish by 2050) and taxpayers shouldering the cost of waste cleanup for disposable cups, it's clear that reusable cups are the way of the future.
As the Starbucks on West Fourth Street is affiliated with NYU, it falls under the umbrella of NYU dining hall sustainability initiatives.
Arianna Cooper, the director for sustainability at NYU, explains the reasoning behind the decision.
“In an effort to keep the NYU Community and NYU Eats staff healthy, NYU Eats stopped allowing reusable cups in NYU Eats facilities when we re-opened after covid. Quite often, people were bringing in dirty cups which could contaminate our beverage dispensers,” Cooper says. She also points to other university initiatives that have been helping NYU “go green,” like sourcing cage-free eggs, buying from local and organic producers, and serving eco-friendly coffee.
While NYU is making strides in sustainability within the dining halls, it’s also important to include Starbucks, a favorite for students both with and without meal plans. Starbucks’ own personal cup initiative is steadily gaining traction, pledging to reduce their carbon and water footprint in half by 2030, with nearly 400,000 Starbucks Rewards members in the U.S. embracing reusable cups, and 20% of baristas use them for their shift beverages.
Rhymik, the head barista at the campus Starbucks, says the interest in reusable cups is definitely there. "At least ten students a day bring in their cups," asking to use them for their drinks, he says.
Many of NYU’s pandemic-era policies have fallen to the wayside, such as vaccines cards, mask mandates and mandatory social distancing policies. If other COVID restrictions have been lifted, it only makes sense to relax a minor rule like this one for the sake of sustainability. Letting customers use reusable cups again, and for those customers, remembering to bring in those cups— a simple tweak to daily habits— is an easy change that could make a big difference.
As of January 3, 2024, Starbucks became the only national coffeehouse in the U.S. to offer customers the option to use their personal cup when they make a mobile order.
Customers who bring in their own cups are privy to a ten-cent discount and reward members to 25 bonus stars, benefits that NYU students are missing out on at the West Fourth Street location.