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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

#101

Post by nozzlegear »

bell-cot wrote: post #23
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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishcycling Some accounts I've seen emphasized the "don't check it, don't think about it, don't look bad, don't feel bad" performative and self-delusion aspects.

I only recently learned that term, but I used to do "wishcycling" myself years ago. I figured if I wasn't sure it could be recycled, they'd know for sure at the recycling plant and sort it out there.

I partly blame an old Discovery Channel episode I watched as a teenager (probably Dirty Jobs?), which highlighted a line of men standing in front of a conveyer belt at some kind of recycling or garbage plant, manually sorting things out of the waste by hand before the bulk of it got dumped into a huge vat of treatment water. The impression it left on me was that there's always a bunch of dudes at the conveyer belt who were going to check and make sure nothing unrecyclable went into the recycling process.

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

#102

Post by bayindirh »

JohnFen wrote: post #82
bayindirh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Far, far earlier than the '90s. Glass has been regularly recycled from the early days of glassmaking itself.

You’re absolutely right. I meant recycling as ordinary citizens in my country with that date.

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

#103

Post by kube-system »

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.

Most municipal recycling programs accept a lot of materials they do not currently recycle because retraining people is harder than sorting materials on their end, and not necessary since they sort it anyway.

After sorting they look for buyers of the raw materials. This varies depending on the market and quality of the material. Everything left over is sent to the landfill.

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

#104

Post by kube-system »

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.

The catalysts used in industrial PLA manufacturing processes use chemicals derived from propane.

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

#105

Post by kube-system »

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…

If I'm going to use my own cup I just bring coffee from home in it.

Personally, when I get a coffee to-go, I want a disposable cup so that I don't have to carry it around for the rest of the day.

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

#106

Post by kube-system »

remyp wrote: post #93
legitster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess so, but it seems to me it would be far more efficient to use already-above-ground materials (there are loads of them floating in the ocean!) and leave the oil in the ground.

Yes, if those material are, in fact, usable. For most types of plastics, recyclability is technically problematic.

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

#107

Post by kube-system »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #16
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…

> Unwanted elements include any kind of glass or glass bottle ?? Isn't this one of the most recyclable materials there is? Even aluminum cans come with contaminants that can't be removed by the consumer. Regardless, at least you can easily reuse glass jars for home use. I find they make excellent drinking glasses and the reusable lid is a nice perk.

> Isn't this one of the most recyclable materials there is

It is! ... if it's unbroken, sorted by type, and in a place where there's demand for it.

Unfortunately, those advantages are often compromised by the recycling pipeline itself. Bottles of different types are thrown into trucks, and become unsafe shards of glass that are unsafe to handle and difficult to sort by type. It quickly becomes more trouble than it is worth given that the alternative is sand.

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

#108

Post by npunt »

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…

Bringing your own cup is also healthier, because paper cup linings are made of plastic that when exposed to hot liquids are likely to turn into microplastics.

My rule is: 1) keep hot stuff away from plastic, and 2) assume everything is/has plastic unless you know for certain.

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

#110

Post by kube-system »

Teever wrote: post #64
wffurr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes more energy and work to reuse glass than to just make new glass. Sand is abundant. Recycled aluminum is much less energy intensive than new aluminum even with contaminants.

Is that true if the bottle is reused several times? I know that in some places they standardize the glass beer bottles to one or two types and strongly encourage people to bring the bottles back to the same location that they get beer from. This results in a circular supply chain that sees bottles sterilized and reused many times. The number I heard was an average of 8 uses on average before a bottle gets a chip in i…

Yeah it is very cheap and viable to wash/reuse bottles, but this requires special handling and isn't compatible with the single-stream systems widely used in the US.

In the US we throw everything into a truck and we expect recyclers to sort and re-melt a bunch of broken shards of assorted glass.

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