A plastic Starbucks cup dropped into a recycling bin in Brooklyn traveled 463 miles before landing at Apex Landfill in Amsterdam, Ohio. Not a recycling plant. A landfill.
Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit that fights plastic pollution, released a report Wednesday documenting how it attached GPS trackers to cups placed in Starbucks recycling bins. The group wanted to find out where the cups actually went. Every single tracked cup ended up somewhere other than a recycling facility.
“When a company tells you something is being recycled and it isn’t, it doesn’t just mislead the customer, it also takes the pressure off for real solutions, which is using less plastic in the first place,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, told reporters.
The cups are made of polypropylene — No. 5 plastic. They’re technically recyclable, but Beyond Plastics said it could find only a handful of commercial operators in the country that claim to handle post-consumer polypropylene. That gap between what’s recyclable in theory and what gets recycled in practice is the whole problem, the group argues.
Starbucks pushed back. Emily Albright, a company spokesperson, said in a statement that the cups carry a “widely accepted for recycling” designation and that “recycling in practice also requires local community infrastructure.” She said Starbucks works with recycling companies to expand access.
The coffee chain already uses fiber to-go cups in hundreds of locations across 14 states, according to the report, which calls on Starbucks to roll them out everywhere. Whether the company plans to do that isn’t clear.
Beyond Plastics is now lobbying for the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act in Albany. The bill — sponsored by Assemblymember Deborah Glick and state Sen. Pete Harckham, both Democrats — targets single-use packaging. It hasn’t come to a vote yet.
Reported by Politico. Read the original report.
