I visited this Starbucks back in October with my fellow caffeinated friend Ryan. I heard about this new Starbucks opening up south of Seattle. Starbucks is calling this an "up-cycled" way of building. It takes old metal shipping containers and recycling them into a functional coffee shop!
The store is located at 10100 East Marginal Way in Tukwila Washington. It is made up of a total of four shipping containers and is a drive/walk up location only. It measures 448 square feet with just enough room for three baristas to work. It does have a nice area for customers to sit outside and includes a bathroom made into the end of one of the containers. One extra neat "eco-friendly" idea they had was to make the roof designed with drains to recycle rain water, which is piped to irrigate the plants near the store. When we visited this store it was still the Fall season. We both ended up ordering one of our favorite drinks the salted carmel frappuccino. So yummy, I wish they had them year round! The baristas were very friendly and fast with our order. There was a chill in the air sitting outside so we ended up going back to the car. It makes for a much better place to sit and talk during the warmer months.
In closing, I just really want to say that I think it is really great that Starbucks has a great determination to reuse and recycle any material they can. This should be a model to encourage cooperation's that "green building" is important to protecting the environment! I hope to see more of these buildings built and can't wait to see what they they think of next. Go check out this store and see for yourself what a great thing they have done here...Thanks to these websites for additional info & pictures:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/a-different-kind-of-container-store/
http://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-container-concept-store-seattle-2011-12#-2
http://www.starbucksmelody.com/2011/12/19/the-shipping-container-starbucks/
