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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

#71

Post by throwaway27448 »

tmnvix wrote: post #41
throwaway27448 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there's no point in reducing your personal carbon footprint without holding capital accountable at the state level.

If I remember correctly, US per capita CO2 footprint is around 14 tonnes (this includes industrial activity). Average US driver of an ICE vehicle produces around 4 tonnes of CO2 per year. Personal choices matter.

I think the second half of your argument is missing. How much of that CO2 emission is even in my control? What is capital doing to reduce its end of output? What sort of mechanisms do I even have to control the economy? I can't stop american companies from selling out my grandkid's future. My parents couldn't either. Our economy is simply not structured to reflect collective interest. If you vote for a political party that does want to take this seriously, you get accused of supporting fascism.

I'm not going to sweat recycling while our entire political economy makes a farce of caring about the future.

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

#72

Post by LeifCarrotson »

synack wrote: post #35
dzink wrote: post #14

Visited a recycling facility recently. It’s a private company that covers an entire county in California. They filter the garbage wit people and a big machine and seem to get paid by companies abroad to ship them all recyclable materials - plastics, cardboard, metals, glass. That pays enough to keep them in business for decades. Someone really needs to look at where the materials from our garbage go.

I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.

I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.

They got paid to accept bales of recycled "HDPE" that they could mix at between 10 and 30% into their virgin materials. They get paid to accept it! Negative profit for the waste management company, pure profit for the "user".

This worked best on black, coffee, slate grey, mahogany - you get the idea - the whites and tans and bright colors were basically pure virgin material (and their own internally-recycled offcuts of dyed virgin materials of matching colors) even though their FAQ states:

> What percentage of recycled materials are used?

> The percentage of recycled materials in our lumber can vary depending on the availability of post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. We continuously strive to maximize the use of recycled content in every piece of lumber.

Personally, I don't think that the fact that you started with pure virgin material, extruded some plastic, cut it up and used most of it, but put some of what was virgin material a few hours ago back into the grinder and extruder makes the resulting plastic "recycled".

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

#73

Post by 1970-01-01 »

bluGill wrote: post #38
1970-01-01 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would they? Aluminum needs a lot of energy to melt and then reform into something new. Since the alloy is not known they need to refine the different metals out just to ensure that they get the correct alloy for the user. Mining Al uses a lot more energy. That is I suspect the total damage from new plastic is less than recycled Al. Someone needs to find numbers to verify this of course.

I'm finding info of just 5% from a scrap ingot:

https://aluminium-guide.com/aluminium-alloys-food-beverage-c...

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

#74

Post by alnwlsn »

bluGill wrote: post #51
lapetitejort wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also celluloid (made from cellulose), which I was pretty surprised to learn is about 170 years old. Plastics from oil were mostly invented after WWI and took off during WWII, but they had some kinds before that.

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

#75

Post by JohnFen »

mulmen wrote: post #30
malfist wrote: post #2

This 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 HQ city Seattle, WA accepts all plastic numbers in the curbside bin.

But does Seattle actually recycle all the plastic numbers? There are a number of places where all plastic numbers are accepted in the bin, but some (and sometimes all, depending on market conditions) of them are thrown into the trash later. The logic is that, overall, plastic recycling can be increased by not requiring people to decipher the codes.

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

#76

Post by emj »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #10
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.

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.

Aluminium is a really bad container for aciduous food stuff. You need a good plastic liner in the cans to handle it. So it is absolutely not a perfect container.

The problem is the packaging not the recycling.

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

#77

Post by gritspants »

gritspants wrote: post #27
antran22 wrote: post #24

All this greenwashing effort by big brands are laughable. The cost of actually recycle any used cups would far exceed the cost to manufacture them. When just the act of using those cups has already give them all the "environmentally aware" credit, why would they bother follow through with the rest of the process. The biggest scam is the paper straw. You still need a certain plastic liner, otherwise the straw will mel…

Bringing your own is a health hazard. It spreads germs all over the equipment.

I don't mind the downvotes but, what? No responsible company is going to want a bunch of unused cups interacting with their gear.

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

#78

Post by kg »

andreimackenzie wrote: post #60

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…

I wonder how much of it comes down to inconvenience. I've been bringing my own thermos for a year or so now and it took me some time to get used to the ritual of scrubbing it with soap and a bottle brush after use every day - at first I found it inconvenient enough that it made me want to just get paper cups.

Now it's a nice little ritual and I am used to the advantages of bringing my own insulated container with a lid - I can carry it back with groceries or do other errands without worrying about my drink spilling or getting cold.

FWIW I do occasionally see other people at my local coffee shop show up with their own mugs, but I agree that it's quite rare.

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

#79

Post by ZeroGravitas »

tadfisher wrote: post #55
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

Though specifically they would have welcomed sorted recyclables, but for whatever reason the US seemed entirely unable to correctly label the goods being shipped and were just shipping mixed trash and claiming it was something else.
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