Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling(beyondplastics.org) |
Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling(beyondplastics.org) |
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 incinerator. But I have literally been to one of the transfer centers they have listed here and they absolutely process recycling there.
They admit 3 were sent to specific recycling baling facilities... and they just didn't count them because they didn't feel like it?
Then there's this weird statement:
> "PureCycle's Ironton, Ohio, plant claims to recycle polypropylene through so-called "chemical recycling,” but Beyond Plastics does not consider chemical recycling to be recycling given that most of the plastic these facilities accept is not actually recycled but turned into fossil fuels or feedstocks using high heat or chemicals. It's a distraction that has failed for decades and is allowing companies to exponentially increase plastic production while polluting low-income communities and communities of color with hazardous waste and toxic air pollution."
Ignoring the white-knighting, it's weird to make the claim that recycling a petroleum-based product into it's obvious petroleum use case doesn't count.
The biggest problem though is that the outcomes for a paper cup are probably worse. 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.
This is an obvious methodology problem, no? Bluetooth-enabled trackers are not recyclable, so they ended up in the correct place.
These trackers probably had CR2032 batteries that could damage a shredder, would pollute the resulting pulp, and could easily be pulled out of the mixed recyclables stream by a magnet.
Whether or not the cup itself made it to a recycling facility is not something this experiment actually tested for. All they know is the tracker didn't make it. The system appears to be working as expected.
Some they can arguably prove were probably on the way to a landfill. But "none pinged from a recycling facility" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.
There is no actual oversight from the FTC or related organization for recyclability product labels.
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.
AFAIK plastic recycling is limited to polyethylene (clear plastic for bottles and so on) and high density polyethylene (larger containers, piping)
PVC, low density polyethylene, and polypropylene are either not recyclable or not worth recycling.
I just assume any plastic I throw in a recycling bin ends up in a landfill and any metal gets recycled.
We should stop pretending to recycle plastic other than HDPE and PET and focus on recycling those, or just landfill all plastics.
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.
My rule is: 1) keep hot stuff away from plastic, and 2) assume everything is/has plastic unless you know for certain.
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.
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.
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.
It will become more expensive when we have to pay for the energy embedded in it, but the difference is not significative on almost any end-product.
With our current exposure, it is estimated that 40-50 years worth of oil remains, although there is likely to be new locations found and an overall reduction of oil usage in the coming years.
At the end of the night, all three bins go into the same dumpster, they recycle nothing there.
Just because the city offers a recycling pickup, doesn't mean most of it actually gets recycled.
Highly recommend this podcast for those who still spend time sorting plastic into their recycling bin:
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
The merchant (who produces the product and fills the boxes from the same country as where I live) ended up finding an answer: the manufacturer does not yet do this in europe
How is this legal to print on your product if you don't offer the service anywhere on the continent...
And that’s only the plastic that isn’t shipped to third world countries to be piled up in their countryside
World except America: I'm going to legally mandate what they do.
Americans: I'm going to get mad at the abstract concept of recycling.
Europe has great rates of recycling collection, but processing remains just as much of a problem there as it does anywhere in the global market for recycled plastic. Quite a bit of recycling that is collected does not actually end up being recycled.
Furthermore, Europe's recycling rate has declined over the past decade? Why? Probably the same difficulties that the entire globe faces -- China stopped allowing "recycling" imports because much of it ended up in the Yangtze. Now, a lot of the "recycling exports" are sent to countries in Africa with the same issues. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/90-of-plastic-pollut...
The reality is that the promises made by recycling companies in developing nations that accept the western world's recycling are not very rigorous to say the least. Much of your recycling sent to Africa is picked through for the most valuable stuff and the rest is burned or dumped.
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.
The problem is the packaging not the recycling.
Not saying people do it only to virtue signal, they just don't realize the net positive effect is very, very low.
Driving an electric vehicle (instead of ICE), on the other hand? Actually quite a large impact that 1 person can make.
Plastics? You're fucked. There's no money in it. Takes too much efffort. Contamination with food.
The biggest scam is the paper straw. You still need a certain plastic liner, otherwise the straw will melt down in 3 minutes from direct contact with liquid. The amount of plastic you reduce is penny-on-the-100-bucks-note comparing to the amount of plastic waste produced by industrial activities.
The only way to fix the single-use container problem is for governments to ban it. Either the customers bring their own/rent the shops' containers for take away, or drink their beverages in the shop.
Is this doable? I guess. AFAIR the EU are experimenting with laws around this. Plastic bags ban is already visible in many country, even in non-first-world countries.
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.
I agree on the misleading claims part, but they do allow you to bring in your own personal cup already as long as it's clean. I don't see how that's not an alternative.
If you care about the environment, BY FAR the most important thing you can do is reducing your carbon footprint. Everything else is really a rounding error compared to that. But that requires a materially poorer existence: living in a smaller home, eating meat less frequently, foregoing air travel, bundling up in the winter instead of cranking up the heat, etc.
Most people generally feel like we need to do more for the environment, and have a vague sense of guilt if they're not contributing. However, that guilt is not strong enough for them to be willing to meaningfully decrease their standard of living. It is strong enough to make them willing to sort their trash into separate bins. Hence recycling.
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 recycling vs mining and refining.
It saves 30% of the energy inputs to reuse slightly contaminated glass, especially when done locally.
That's ignoring the energy inputs of mining and delivering the silica.
https://learn.sustainability-directory.com/learn/what-are-th...
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 items to other things. Both are excellent lines and are not more expensive than their usual wares.
?? 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.
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.
Recycled aluminum is much less energy intensive than new aluminum even with contaminants.
Also, some of pizzas I get have a separate circle piece they sit on and the box doesn't get any grease on it.
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 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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-r...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
https://gijn.org/stories/case-studies-investigating-where-ga...
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2022/5/16/wha...
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".
At family gatherings here it's a typical argument for why there's allegedly no point separating out plastics: the recycling bin allegedly also ends up there. Nobody ever has a source for me though so take that for what it's worth, but it seems to generally be a thing
These things have to be fixed at the incentive layer. Self-regulation is the best form of regulation, by far.
Any discarded plastic found outside of a landfill should be tallied and result in a fine for the company which produced the plastic.
If a person is caught discarding a plastic bottle (littering), they should receive a fine as normal but the company should also be fined a portion of the liability.
The company knows very well that some percentage of the plastic they sell will end up in nature. They know this for a fact... And yet they choose to keep producing plastic packaging when cleaner alternatives exist; I.e. tin cans and glass bottles.
We've been completely brainwashed by the cult of 'limited liability'. It's a horrible idea. The words themselves tell you everything. Right there in front of your face. The liability is limited... It means the liability is externalized. This construct should never have been allowed.
Now with AI and the externalized harms which will result from it, this construct is more important than ever. Lives are at stake.
Once we start assigning partial liability to every harm. Eventually, we'll be able to collectively identify all of them; they will become so rare that they will stand out like a sore thumb.
Imagine; all the people who are currently messing up the political system with useless bureaucracy and toxic ideologies could actually be useful to society. Instead of identifying each other's genders, orientations and emotional triggers, they could be identifying social and environmental harms and holding companies accountable.
Are you sure? A garbage truck direct to the landfill is less energy than a garbage truck (for what isn't recycled), and a second truck to the sort facility, all the machines to sort, and then a truck to the landfill. Now if only Al goes on the recycling truck this is a clear win since recycled Al much less energy than mining new. However for many plastics the value is already questionable if it is recycled, and clearly worse if not. (I'm not sure about paper or glass)
Yes, if everything else were held equal, but it's not. People have a limited amount of energy to dedicate to caring about environmental issues; every minute spent talking about recycling (or other only marginally important environmental issues) is one we're not spending talking about things that matter.
And by FAR the most effective way to do that for the average person is to drive less.
Most people have no idea how far they need to drive to produce 1kg of CO2 (even though it's widely advertised alongside fuel efficiency).
Personal choices matter.
No, it's a scheme to stave off taxes on plastic packaging, or regulations to mandate glass. Which industry cares about how people feel about themselves, to fund and promote this scheme? On the other hand, it's very easy to point to the industry that benefits from continued use of plastic.
Not really, no. The carbon footprint associated with your consumption has little-to-nothing to do with the type of economic structure that provides it.
Lots of fossil fuels are produced by the state, some even in socialist countries. Burning oil extracted by Pemex or Petróleos de Venezuela releases just as much carbon as oil extracted by Chevron.
And high-quality grass-fed organic beef raised by your local rancher involves at least as much carbon emissions as the cheapest beef you can get from Wal-Mart. Why wouldn't it?
The issue is consumption of fossil fuels, not capitalism. Capitalism is indirectly at fault only inasmuch as it has grown the economy, enabling our consumption of fossil fuels to increase.
Also some material like aluminum are very valuable to recycle even if we're throwing plastic in the trash.
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.
https://aluminium-guide.com/aluminium-alloys-food-beverage-c...
But transport and sorting (glass is hard and sharp) eat into that margin, so presort
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 it that renders it unsuitable for reuse, and then it is recycled.
It seems to me that this tight distribution loop is a key part of successful reuse and recycling endeavours.
Insanely naive take. They react to capital.
I'm not going to sweat recycling while our entire political economy makes a farce of caring about the future.
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.
You’re absolutely right. I meant recycling as ordinary citizens in my country with that date.