STARBUCKS was blasted by environmental experts last night after The Sun discovered it pours millions of litres of precious water down the drain at its coffee shops. The giant coffee chain has a policy of keeping a tap running non-stop at all its 10,000 outlets worldwide, wasting 23.4 MILLION litres a day. That would provide enough daily water for the entire two million-strong population of drought-hit Namibia in Africa or fill an Olympic pool every 83 minutes.
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. Staff are banned from turning the water off under bizarre health and safety rules — bosses claim a constant flow stops germs breeding in the taps. Starbucks has built up a massive chain, popular with coffee drinkers from Hollywood stars to builders, and proudly boasts of its work for the environment. But water companies accused the firm of HARMING the environment by frittering away a vital natural resource. And the claim that running taps are needed for hygiene reasons was dismissed by experts as “nonsense”.
Starbucks has 698 branches in Britain, each open for 13 hours a day. Even a slow flowing tap spurts out at least three litres of water a minute, meaning UK Starbucks are wasting an estimated 1.63 MILLION litres a day. That is the daily water requirement for a town the size of Matlock, Derbyshire. And water shortage is seen as one of the major problems facing the world.
This is puzzling, there seems to be absolutely no advantage for doing this, so why can’t the “Manager” grow a pair and make the decision to turn it off?
#29 “I’m sure if you had to drink from the same place that cows”
I’m sure too. Those that want it, can pay to have it shipped.
>>I’m sure too. Those that want it, can pay to
>>have it shipped.
I’d pay just to see cows, horses, and other animals showering.
#32 – Mister Mustard
Now, don’t get too excited…
The problem is not a lack of water… it’s the increasing cost of making water drinkable.
They need to go after Braum’s for this. They’ve had the water jet thing going in every store as long as I remember.
As for water being an infinite resource, let’s add a qualifier.
Water is an infinite resource.
CLEAN water is not an infinite resource.
The can “spoil material” on the spoons will get flushed off and any germs that might have grown there will be forced to live further down stream.
The people paying the water bill know more than the person who wrote the article.
This is for all the idiots that think making drinking water is hard or expensive.
60 years ago a proposal was made in CA. It was to pump seawater up to the high desert. You dump it on the dry lake beds. You do this on a massive scale. Due to the geo make up you end up being able to sink wells and take advantage of slow sand filtration.
“Sir Francis Bacon in his famous compilation “A Natural History of Ten Centuries” talked elaborately about desalination. According to him if seawater is allowed to percolate through the sand, it can be purified.
The experiment of sand filtration was first illustrated by the famous Italian physician Lucas Antonius Portius. He wrote elaborately about the multiple sand filtration method in his famous book “Soldier’s Vade Mecum”. He illustrated water filtration experiment by using three pairs of sand filters.”
It has been used for hundreds of years.
Reading comments written by you bunch of naive morons who think you know it all never ceases to amaze me.
One of the few sane people here # 35 Rick Cain puts it best, “Water is an infinite resource.
CLEAN water is not an infinite resource.”
Those of you who think you are so smart with your play of words and fancy chemistry, no duh H20 has been recycled for the past millions of years.
But the water that runs outta your tap and doesn’t look yellowish or anything too artistic are treated water. It doesn’t matter if it was filtered through a massive sand bed or distilled or whatever, pumping and storing water on a large scale is not anything an average joe like you or me can afford. They are $$$!
And then you add the overhead costs like maintenance and energy costs things really start adding up.
So the shocking truth here to you smartasses…wasting is bad. =O (are you as surprised as I am, you simpleminded monkeys?)
#38
Not my water, bozo. It is fed by gravity from a mountain stream and that which I don’t drink is “wasted” by flowing on to the ocean. We all make choices. You choose to live somewhere with water that is toxic enough to require treatment, my little monkey friend.
Oh dear, #39 Montangaguy. This isn’t easy to tell you, but not the entire world lives by mountains. I’ll be honest with you you are minority.
Heck if everyone moved to your mountains and start sharing your free water with you, your water won’t be so clean anymore.
Anyway for majority of the world clean water doesn’t come free, so yeah conserving tap water isn’t such a bad idea for the sake of the environment and economy.
As for people like you who apparently don’t care at all, I don’t see why you bothered commenting in the first place. Don’t you think?
#37–Paddy OH===hahahahah! Gee, why isn’t sand filtration used today instead of expensive reverse osmosis or steam vacuum systems? All we need to do is go back to Bacon or Portius. I guess you go for any pseudo-science there is, if its in a really old book? That idolatry of debunked authorities dominates your posts.
You never provide sites for your BS, but I wondered how quickly it would be to debunk your gibberish. Somewhat hard to do when a proposition simply isn’t true. But this source came up fairly easy: http://www.randomhistory.com/1-50/001water.html
A baseline knowledge of science/life would give you the general information that sand filters are used to remove large solid particulates (leaves, dead possums, car tires and the like)–not dissolved salts.
I’ll leave it to your fetid imagination to devine what the consequences would be to pump salt water onto the land.
Silly person.