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Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

beyondplastics.org

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Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#51

Post by bluGill »

lapetitejort wrote: post #43
steviedotboston wrote: post #36

Landfills really aren't that bad. modern landfills have multiple layers of lining to prevent leaking into water supplies and soil. After they are full, they are covered with earth and can become usable land. Their gases have to be managed (can be burned for electricity or processed in other ways) but overall putting trash in the ground and covering it seems alright to me. The amount of land that you actually need isn…

The point is that we may not have plastic forever. Oil is a finite resource. An easy, cheap replacement hasn't been found yet. Either we abide by reducing and reusing (where we should be focused), or we should actually recycle.

PLA plastic as commonly used in 3d printers comes from plant materials not oil. We know how to make any plastic from pure CO2 (and whatever else needed for the atoms) - however the massive amount of energy needed to do so makes it uneconomical.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#52

Post by legitster »

hamdingers wrote: post #48

> Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility. This is an obvious methodology problem, no? Bluetooth-enabled trackers are not recyclable, so they ended up in the correct pla…

If you look at the raw data they provided, more than half of them just stop transmitting while on the highway.

Some they can arguably prove were probably on the way to a landfill. But "none pinged from a recycling facility" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#53

Post by bombcar »

nozzlegear wrote: post #7

Slightly 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…

Strange, ours explicitly called out pizza boxes as being recyclable. I wonder what the difference is.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#54

Post by rileymat2 »

themafia wrote: post #50
rileymat2 wrote: post #44

My local Starbucks has 2 bins for recyclables and trash with little images about what to put in each bin. Many customers look at them, think, and put them in the right bin. Most just throw them in the middle trash bin. At the end of the night, all three bins go into the same dumpster, they recycle nothing there.

My gut feeling is this should be illegal. It's something like false advertising.

It is questionable, I assume they are using standard corporate products and our local rural-ish area does not have very good options.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#55

Post by tadfisher »

t1234s wrote: post #4

I 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.

Asia stopped taking our semi-recyclable waste a few years back, which is how all this greenwashing was exposed

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#57

Post by jstanley »

legitster wrote: post #49

There's a lot to unpack here. None of this is serious methodology. It's more of a PR statement. From their raw data, the 36 tests came from a much smaller handful of stores in urban locations - in reality it's a much smaller sample size. 8 alone came from urban New York. 6 came from a single Starbucks location in Olympia, WA. They jump to the conclusion that a transfer center means it's bound for landfill or incinera…

> not actually recycled but turned into fossil fuels or feedstocks

This is such a great claim.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#58

Post by semiquaver »

themafia wrote: post #50
rileymat2 wrote: post #44

My local Starbucks has 2 bins for recyclables and trash with little images about what to put in each bin. Many customers look at them, think, and put them in the right bin. Most just throw them in the middle trash bin. At the end of the night, all three bins go into the same dumpster, they recycle nothing there.

My gut feeling is this should be illegal. It's something like false advertising.

Most recycling in retail contexts is pure theater either way, so why expend the effort to actually separate streams that will inevitable be combined later.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#59

Post by legitster »

steviedotboston wrote: post #36

Landfills really aren't that bad. modern landfills have multiple layers of lining to prevent leaking into water supplies and soil. After they are full, they are covered with earth and can become usable land. Their gases have to be managed (can be burned for electricity or processed in other ways) but overall putting trash in the ground and covering it seems alright to me. The amount of land that you actually need isn…

Hear me out:

Single use plastics are a carbon sequestration technology.

We take oil out of the ground, and instead of burning it we turn it into a solid and bury it again.

Something like 30% of the oil we consume never ends up getting burned. While that's probably not a 30% reduction in CO2 gasses, the price pressure plastics put on fossil fuels is not negligible.

Re: Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling

#60

Post by andreimackenzie »

My local Starbucks offers a 10 cents discount and extra loyalty points for bringing your own cup. I've started bringing an insulated one that keeps coffee hot for longer & doesn't sweat with an iced beverage. I seldom see others bringing their own cups, even regulars I see there every week, even when Starbucks themselves sell reusable cups. It is almost like there is a weird stigma about handing the barista something that doesn't come from behind the counter. I encourage trying it, especially if you visit the same coffee shop habitually like I do.
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