The culture of having a starbucks before catching a flight is quite common across several business travelers. What stuck me though was whenever I was presented a question for a receipt needed yes or now, the answer never really mattered. The receipt gets printed. It gets discarded either by the consumer or by the barista when the receipt was not requested by the patron. 

As a socially responsible company Starbucks has a long way to go. A small change it can make would be stop printing unwanted receipts. According to a recent article in Hackermoon,

https://hackernoon.com/digital-receipts-in-retail-b415fbdfde3f

"In the US, over 12.4 million trees and 13 billion gallons of water are consumed each year in the creation of paper receipts, generating 1.5 billion pounds of waste and 4 billion pounds of CO2"

"An average paper receipt costs between $0.015–0.05 per receipt. This means that a merchant printing 1000 receipts a day spends between $5,475 to $18,250 per year just on the thermal paper. Going paperless could cut the expenses on receipts drastically as there won’t be a need for printing materials."

May be just maybe Starbucks can raise the bar here and make the latte or mocha a little bit more price appealing by cutting down receipt costs. And ofcourse add another feather in their Green Cap.

By the way.. the problem seems to be in existence for several years now... reference the below link from Buzzfeed

https://www.buzzfeed.com/justinpd2/starbucks-needs-to-stop-printing-out-receipts-for-hkqp

thanks in advance to all the folks who are helping to share this petition.