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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

#81

Post by antran22 »

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.

When I bring my thermos to a coffee shop, brew the beverage in their own mixer before pouring it in my thermos. There is exactly no contact between their equipment and my container, beside the barista hands (which they should periodically wash anyway) and between the butt of the thermos and the table. Also most of them give the thermos a few rinses & wash with the soapy water jet thingy before pouring.

I'm assuming you are much more conscious about this issue than I am (that's fine btw, people have various levels of germophobia) , but practically my whole office block do this without any noticeable health epidemic.

Also standard coffee shops (the Starbucks kinds) always have industrial scale utensil washers that rinse boiling water/UV radiate the utensils. Assuming a government issue the appropriate law, the coffee shops will be able to ensure your container hygiene just fine.

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

#82

Post by JohnFen »

bayindirh wrote: post #17
malfist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and recycling it takes as much energy if not more than just making new. It's just melted, mixed and reused, AFAIK. We're recycling glass since forever (maybe mid 90s), and the recycling bins were put out by our national glassware company. They even have a special line built with these, recycled glasses, which I don't remember the name. They also have a "upcycle" line where they repurpose their fine but not perfect…

> We're recycling glass since forever (maybe mid 90s)

Far, far earlier than the '90s. Glass has been regularly recycled from the early days of glassmaking itself. It's crushed up into "cullet" and mixed back in.

Glass is great for this because it doesn't degrade from being remelted and reformed, and using cullet reduces the cost of energy and new raw materials when making new glass.

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

#84

Post by bluGill »

PlunderBunny wrote: post #63
bluGill wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've wondered about this because I've heard the same thing from my partner - in Engineering school in Spain, she was told that waste aluminium as a building material should be avoided because it was so expensive to recycle. But we recycle aluminium here in New Zealand - perhaps it's something to do with being able to use green energy at night (New Zealand has abundant hydro power)?

Al uses a lot of energy. Recycling is much less than uses to get it from mining.

I've never heard of anyone using aluminum for a building (though I'm sure it has been done) - the properties in general make it a poor choice (see a real meteorologist for details - alloy matters and there are many choices). Al is commonly used for the skin of a building, but not the structural parts.

Al is commonly made where energy is cheap (generally renewable energy!) and then transported around the world. I have no idea what is in Spain or New Zealand, but I'd expect someone in Spain is making things with Al, and they in turn will be glad to recycle anything you can get to them.

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

#85

Post by expedition32 »

kg wrote: post #78
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 l…

[dead]

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

#86

Post by KurSix »

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…

The study looks more like an advocacy stunt than a rigorous audit, but it still points at a real problem: recyclability labels often describe theoretical acceptance, not likely end fate

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

#87

Post by dec0dedab0de »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #70
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…

Burning paper is not the same as burning plastic.

and paper in a landfill is just fine.

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

#88

Post by KurSix »

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…

Yet it still seems like decent evidence that the consumer-facing story is much simpler than the actual recycling path

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

#89

Post by KurSix »

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 think the habit/friction part is underrated

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

#90

Post by vitally3643 »

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…

> All paper cups will be incinerated or sent to a landfill.

Is that surprising? Or "bad" somehow? Paper cups cannot realistically be recycled in any meaningful way. Paper is famously not waterproof, so cups are lined with either plastic or wax. This saturates the fibers in a way that cannot realistically be reversed. Such contaminated fibers can't be used as feedstock, the polymers mess up downstream processes.

The best possible outcome is biodegrading in compost or landfill. Which realistically releases almost as much CO2 as burning.

Wax lined paper cups will fully biodegrade on short timescales. That's literally the best possible outcome for any single-use item. It's not a flaw or a drawback, it's the goal.

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