Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
beyondplastics.org
Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
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Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#2This doesn't surprise me, almost no municipality in the US will recycle number 5 plastics. Why Starbucks says they're "widely recyclable" is a mystery but it certainly seems an effort at deceptive greenwashing.
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#3This doesn't surprise me, almost no municipality in the US will recycle number 5 plastics. Why Starbucks says they're "widely recyclable" is a mystery but it certainly seems an effort at deceptive greenwashing.
Starbucks says it because a retailer- and packaging-industry-backed organization says it: https://greenblue.org/2024/01/04/the-how2recycle-guide-to-re...
There is no actual oversight from the FTC or related organization for recyclability product labels.
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#4I started throwing everything in the garbage except aluminum over the past couple of years. Better off in a US landfill than shipped of to asia and dumped in the ocean.
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#5Recycling is largely a scheme to make people feel better about themselves without actually meaningfully addressing their environmental impact.
If you care about the environment, BY FAR the most important thing you can do is reducing your carbon footprint. Everything else is really a rounding error compared to that. But that requires a materially poorer existence: living in a smaller home, eating meat less frequently, foregoing air travel, bundling up in the winter instead of cranking up the heat, etc.
Most people generally feel like we need to do more for the environment, and have a vague sense of guilt if they're not contributing. However, that guilt is not strong enough for them to be willing to meaningfully decrease their standard of living. It is strong enough to make them willing to sort their trash into separate bins. Hence recycling.
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#6Wow, surprising that it was zero. Is there a chance that the cup was being separated from the tracker at a sorting facility with the cup going to a different destination than the tracker?
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#7Slightly related, but my town has sent out several flyers recently chastising everyone for recycling things that aren't recyclable. If this overambitious recycling continues, the privilege of recycling itself shall be taken away. Unwanted elements include any kind of glass or glass bottle (my wife and I are guilty of recycling cleaned jars of spaghetti sauce); certain types of plastic; and pizza boxes that are "too greasy" (unclear how greasy "too greasy" is).
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#8> It's time for Starbucks to stop making misleading recycling claims and start prioritizing plastic-free, preferably reusable, alternatives for its customers.
I agree on the misleading claims part, but they do allow you to bring in your own personal cup already as long as it's clean. I don't see how that's not an alternative.
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#9Slightly related, but my town has sent out several flyers recently chastising everyone for recycling things that aren't recyclable. If this overambitious recycling continues, the privilege of recycling itself shall be taken away. Unwanted elements include any kind of glass or glass bottle (my wife and I are guilty of recycling cleaned jars of spaghetti sauce); certain types of plastic; and pizza boxes that are "too g…
IIRC any grease is considered a contaminate. So any cardboard with grease splotching should be discarded instead of recycled.
Interesting my municipality recycles glass, but like, why? Silica is the most common mineral in the crust, easily accessible almost everywhere, and recycling it takes as much energy if not more than just making new. It's not like aluminum or steel where there are significant energy savings to recycling vs mining and refining.
Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
#10I started throwing everything in the garbage except aluminum over the past couple of years. Better off in a US landfill than shipped of to asia and dumped in the ocean.
I hate to agree but you're basically right. If we switched everything disposable (glass, plastic, paper) into an aluminum version of itself, the world would be a much better place. Aluminum pizza boxes and Amazon shipments would be weird, and would probably need rounded corners (hello iPhone designers going into box design at retirement) but they would be 100.000% recyclable.