Starbucks backs away from green goals.
A company that has made sustainability a part of its brand is quietly cutting environmental commitments as part of a $2 billion savings program. According to the Financial Times, it also laid off part of its sustainability team.
What has changed:
- the water consumption target disappeared and the company switched to a much narrower metric – instead of about 500 billion liters it now reports only 53 billion liters of “operational” use
- the landfill waste target and even current data did not appear in the new report
- for packaging, the ambition to reduce virgin fossil materials by 50 % was changed to a reduction of virgin plastics by 5 %
- the goal to cut emissions by half by 2030 formally remains, but the company is “actively reassessing” it – a new one is to be presented at the beginning of 2027
Overall emissions were 7 % higher in 2025 than in the baseline year 2019.
Starbucks is not the first American company to retreat under political and cost pressure. However, it stands out for how deeply sustainability was embedded in its identity.
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