A Newly Recycled Bugaboo

Wastewatch, a UK based eco hit-team for hire is engaging in the usual impotent rage because Starbucks leaves water running to prevent their customers from drinking mold resulting from standing water or ingesting traces of rotten milk.

Every Starbucks branch has a cold tap behind the counter providing water for a sink called a "dipper well" used for washing spoons and utensils and the staff are banned from turning the water off under "health and safety rules", an investigation claims.

In a letter to a customer who complained about the waste, a Starbucks executive revealed that a constant flow stops breeding in the taps.

It means that 23.4 million litres of water - enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 83 minutes or sustain the population of drought-hit Namibia - is wasted every day.

Funny that. Mine doesn’t. As it was told on the BBC today, the observation about every store on earth was made by someone stepping into one location in London. Sample of 1 means 100% when you need to bellow in rage for the sake of your company, right?

That supposedly staggering figure amounts to using 60 gallons per store per hour or operation, or the equivalent of 18 households. Big f’ing woop. Not worthy of the globally spunked electrons and words to transmit their horror to all of humanity. Otherwise if you happen to have a Starbuck cup in your hand and wonder where all that water went, part of it is in your cup, the rest goes into a sanitary drain to a processing facility where they often have to add water to the sewerage to attain the right density needed to break down waste and coliform, especially now that we have low-volume and low-flow fixtures in wide use.



Let’s play find the drought striken countries on this here Starbucky-licious map

The pretext for their hectoring is because somewhere on earth there’s always a drought. Last I checked, there are no Starbucks stores in the mortally drought-ridden parts of the world, but in spite of that, no-one dare ask Wastewatch how water “wasted” in Seattle, where there is so much of it that it’s practically a pollutant, to drought-ridden areas.

I’ve asked this before, I’ll ask it again, where’s the damned pipe that will let us give the poor waif our water? Does it cross the Mediterranean or Atlantic? Does it cross the Panama Canal on its’ way to the specially designated poor the activist branch of the leisure class likes to pity more than any one else?

Or are we to simple deny ourselves something, not for the good of anyone needing water, but for the “eco-warriors’” joy in chiding people?

Jacob Tompkins, of Water Wise, said that provided the firm was undertaking all the usual cleaning processes, such a step was unnecessary.

No it isn’t. Anyone who has worked a kitchen, especially one of a chain outlet (who are unusually prone to lawsuits by ‘concerned’ people other than Mr. Tompkins,) sees this as a common practice, but there is no way a “policy advisor” with a pan-european portfolio of staggering scale including every one of today’s issues that can be fashionably eco-labeled would really feel compelled to find that out.