Water Conservation
Water is a precious natural resource, and using it responsibly is essential to the continued success of our company.
A great deal of the water we use in our stores is to make coffee and tea beverages and for “back of the house” operations, such as running dishwashers and ice machines. We’re working to better understand how we use water and how we can use it more responsibly.
Our Goal
We’re committed to achieve 50% reduction in water used in direct operations and coffee production through conservative or replenishment by 2030.
What We’ve Been Doing
We’ve made great strides in reducing water consumption in our stores, such as removing all “dipper wells” – those small bowls with continuous streams of water that cleaned spoons used for pouring milk into espresso drinks – and replacing them with manual faucets, which consume 15% less water.
In many markets, we use a blast of higher-pressure water to clean blender jugs instead of an open tap. We’ve also programmed our espresso machines to dispense less water when rinsing espresso shot glasses. And we train our partners (employees) to keep the refrigeration coils on ice machines clean to reduce the amount of latent heat from the machines and minimize ice melt.
In new stores, we’re installing efficient water fixtures, such as low-flow faucets, toilets and spray heads used to rinse our dishes. In existing stores, we’ve been adding low-flow faucet aerators and replacing inefficient fixtures.
Moving forward, we’ll continue to look for innovative ways to minimize water use in our stores around the world in order to meet, and hopefully exceed, our goal.