Everything but the Coffee by Bryant Simon

questions would start, and six months later, someone in Seattle would say no. That is, in fact, what happened, except I kept Ben out of it. I made an official request to a Starbucks representative to comb through a few of the company’s bags of trash. “You asked if you could spend time going through the trash at one of our stores,” Audrey Lincoff, then vice president of global brand communications, explained to me in an e-mail. “It would be disruptive to the store’s operation to execute what you’re asking.” 12 After this rebuff, I tried to contact a store manger I knew and had interviewed a couple of times, hoping he might give me some trash to look at on the sly, but he had taken another job by that time. I started stealing long peeks in store trash cans, noting what I saw, but this wasn’t the same as getting the bags, as Royte reminded me in a subsequent e-mail. “You need to get the trash and go through it!” she wrote.
    Then one night, I was driving our minivan and I passed a Starbucks. There they were—four bulging black bags sitting on the sidewalk. I drove around the block again and looked, and then I drove around again and looked again. If someone had been watching, they would have thought I was casing the joint. I was, sort of. On the third go round, I stopped in front of the Starbucks. I looked around again. When the coast was clear, I opened the van door and walked slowly over to the bags, not wanting to call attention to myself. One more look around. No one seemed to be looking. I grabbed a bag, threw it into the back of the Sienna, and dashed off.
    The next morning I opened the trash bag. It held a lot of what you would expect a Starbucks trash bag to hold. A thin coat of coffee and cream from people pouring off the excess from their drinks and throwing away what they couldn’t finish covered everything: lids, wooden stirrers, java jackets, brown napkins and pastry bags, thick cardboard to-go trays, plastic knives and forks, straws and straw wrappers, and sugar and Splenda packets. Stuck to these things were half-eaten apples, chewed-on cheese squares, Caesar salad croutons, and discarded chunks of cranberry scone. Mixed in were single-serving butter and cream cheese packets. There were a few empty soda cans and Ethos Water bottles. There was plastic wrap from CDs and shortbread cookies, and a few chocolate milk boxes and balled-up sheets of wax paper. The bag also contained a crushed milk jug and several strips of cardboard. There were copies of the
Metro, New York Times, City Paper, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer
and
Philadelphia Daily News
, and even a week-old crumpled-up local section from the
Des Moines Register
. Someone had thrown away junk mail and a page from a daily planner. I uncovered a box for a new iPod and a blue Gap bag and a few other plastic bags from the grocery store. Some loose change had settled to the bottom—a handful of pennies, a nickel, and two dimes. But mostly there were cups—lots of plastic cups and even more paper cups with promises about saving the planet on each and every one of them.
    THE PAPER CUPS
    When I first discovered Starbucks in Southern California in 1993, employees automatically used two paper cups for serving the hot coffee. That way you could drink it without singeing your hand. Other places in those days gave you hot joe in white Styrofoam cups. While these containers didn’t burn your fingers, they seemed so artificial that they made the coffee inside seem just as fake. At the diner or at the corner grocery, they gave you coffee in a single paper cup topped by a flat plastic lid with, if you were lucky, a napkin wrapped around the outside. After you cut a hole in the top and took a few sips from the jagged spout, the napkin got wet and started to fall apart. When you peeled the bits of paper off, the cup was still hot and you were back to square one: either you burnt your hand, or you had to get another napkin (more wasted paper). At first,