An environmentalist discovered heaps of unused Starbucks food and cups in trash bags on the street, as TikTokers decried its wasteful policies

• TikToker and environmentalist Anna Sacks found unused Starbucks products heaped in trash bags after a NYC store closing.
• Starbucks said while the store had previously donated food, the items in Sacks' TikTok were "no longer deemed safe."
• Sacks said massive trash hauls are common upon store closings, and she's pushing for legislative change.

The environmentalist TikToker Anna Sacks filmed a treasure trove of seemingly untouched Starbucks food and cups heaped in trash bags outside of a recently-shuttered store. Her video filming the discovery has gone viral, baffling angry viewers about large-scale corporate waste.

On June 10, Sacks, whose @TheTrashWalker account has 420,000 followers, stumbled upon a pile of garbage outside of a just-shuttered Starbucks store in New York City. It tingled her "trash spidey senses," she said in the video.

Digging in, she found egg bites (that she described as "still cold"), croissants ("best before October 2023," she read), a bag of coffee beans, tea bags, as well as brownies, bagels, and biscottis. Other bags were filled with paper and plastic cups, coffee stirrers, uncharged Starbucks gift cards, and stacks of napkins.

"There's a church across from the Starbucks, and they probably would've taken everything," Sacks said in the video, which has 2.4 million views.

In her experience, Sacks said massive hauls of corporate trash are common when stores are going out of business. She hopes her TikToks can help advocate for legislative change. "Because this is a pervasive problem, we should have guidelines and standards where the store should make an effort to donate," she told Insider. 

In response, a Starbucks spokesperson told Insider the store in Sacks' TikTok was being relocated, whereby policy calls for all products to be transferred or donated. However, the company claimed that the food depicted in the video were unsafe to transfer or donate.

"In this video, Starbucks can confirm that the food pictured was no longer deemed safe to transfer or donate per food donation standards, and per policy, were required to discard," the spokesperson said over email.

Previously, the location did make regular donations to the Food Bank for New York City, the spokesperson said.

They added that all 10,327 of its company-operated stores in North America are enrolled in its FoodShare program, an initiative launched in 2016 to donate unsold food, which has bestowed 50 million meals to date. That said, the program isn't a requisite for licensed stores — or the 7,135 Starbucks locations housed within other retailers, like Target. 

Sacks takes issue with Starbucks' safety excuse 

Sacks told Insider she disagrees with the notion that the items were unsafe, and takes issue with Starbucks' safety standards. She added that the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, passed in 1996, largely protects donors from liability.

"There are no recorded lawsuits related to food donation, so it's like this pervasive myth," she said.

Commenters shared her outrage. "This is shocking," one wrote. "Couldn't another Starbucks store that's like probably 3 blocks away use those cups and stuff?"

As for its cups, Starbucks has long faced criticism because its plastic-lined paper cups are difficult to recycle. The Starbucks spokesperson told Insider that promoting reusability is its primary strategy for cutting down on waste and that its barriers to recycling are mostly infrastructure-related. (For example, any customer in the US and Canada can bring in their own reusable cup to be served in-store, they said.)

The company is working to expand the initiative to drive-through and mobile orders by the beginning of next year.

Sacks concurs that "the future is reuse over recycle" and that the elimination of single-use items is paramount. One day, she hopes that Starbucks will provide consumers with reusable vessels that they can take along with them, to then ultimately be deposited at other stores to be washed and reused again. 

"My view is, are they doing something? Yes," Sacks concluded. "Are they reaching their full potential? Very far from it."