Water Conservation

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 reducing our water usage by 25% in company-owned stores by 2015. 

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; a project to retrofit water fixtures with efficient technologies on a broad scale is currently in the planning stage and will likely be rolled out in 2012 and 2013. 

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 2015 goal.