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

Post by HDBaseT » Wed, May 20, 2026, 10:22 PM UTC

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.

Post by reverius42 » Wed, May 20, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

vitally3643 wrote: post #90

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 b…

Post by AngryData » Wed, May 20, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

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.

Post by quickthrowman » Wed, May 20, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #134

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.

here's an even crazier idea when oil prices were negative, why didn't environmental enthusiasts figure out how to buy (that is, be paid to receive) a ton of oil, take delivery, and simply not use it? they could bury it right back into the ground, no? look, there are unlimited stupid fucking ideas.

Post by corranh » Wed, May 20, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

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…