In the late 1990s, Rebecca Zimmer left a good
corporate job at Starbucks to follow her passion
for documentary photography. She spent five
years in Africa, working mostly in villages that
housed people with leprosy. What she brought
back home with her, besides an impactful port-
folio, was a new passion for conservation. In
those villages, she came face to face with finite
resources for the first time. “You start to under-
stand how every drop of water is sacred,” she
says. “When I returned to Starbucks in 2004, I
was really focused on ways that sensitivity for
the environment could play out at a global scale.”
Back in Seattle, Zimmer built her own sustain-
able lifestyle: she drives a hybrid; is a vegetarian;
and ensures that every bit of nitrogen-rich coffee
grounds from her (off-grid) French press goes
straight into her garden compost. And at Star-
bucks, she is the driving force behind multiple
massive conservation projects—including the
company’s recent commitment to build every
new store to LEED standards (an environmen-
tally friendly, energy-thrifty certification) and
retrofit existing ones to run on renewable energy
sources and use dishwashing practices that will
amount to a 30 percent reduction in water use
in Starbucks stores by 2025.
But perhaps most notable was when Zim-
mer took on the growing problem of plastic
straws. Last July, Starbucks announced itwould phase them out of its stores—world-
wide—by 2020, no small win considering
Americans alone toss more than 500 million
straws every day. While many are made from
recyclable polypropylene, they’re too light
and small to be captured by mechanical
sorters—so they end up in our landfills and
oceans. Starbucks’ move will keep about 1
billion straws annually from impacting our
planet. In their place: new sippable lids de-
signed for its cold drinks, which are recyclable
and contain 9 percent less plastic than a
traditional lid and straw. And that’s only the
beginning, says Zimmer: “Straws represent
an initial foray into addressing our plastics
footprint. We’re excited about it. But it’s just a
first step in a global effort.”Saving Plastic Straws from Landfills
Rebecca Zimmer
Global Director of Environment, Starbucks