And the companies are inviting all of their competitors in the industry to join in.
In the world of quick coffee, Starbucks and McDonald’s are as fierce as competitors come. They’re multibillion-dollar global giants, fighting for our caffeinated (кофеиносодержащий) hearts through drizzles and discounts.
But when it comes to the cup that coffee comes in, they’re now on the same team. McDonald’s and Starbucks are joining forces to build a fully recyclable, compostable (биоразлагаемый) cup of the future within the next three years–one that may include not just the cup itself, but a lid and straw (трубочка) to go along with it.
The news comes on the heels of a food industry charge to reduce plastic in packaging, and straws in particular (в частности), by Chipotle, Subway, and Burger King, too. Starbucks itself just announced a new lid to replace straws in many drinks as part of a 2020 initiative to ban (запретить) straws altogether. Together, McDonald’s and Starbucks distribute a combined 4% of the world’s 600 billion cups annually, and represent two of the top three most popular food chains worldwide (по всему миру). Each company’s cups are technically recyclable, but, for all sorts of practical matters related to recycling infrastructure, they rarely are.
McDonald’s and Starbucks plan to leverage their combined scale to change the way all single-use cups are made and disposed of. It’s a plan of unprecedented scale in the fast-food industry to improve its ecological footprint. “We’ve been at this for a while [alone], but we were getting tired of incrementality,” says Colleen Chapman, vice president of Starbucks’s global social impact overseeing sustainability.
