Starbucks Flogs Its Plastic Cups As "Widely Recyclable", But Only 1-2% Of Polypropylene Is Actually Ever Recycled

Frappuccino lovers, rejoice: Your plastic to-go cups are now “widely recyclable.”That’s according to an announcement made in February by Starbucks, the waste hauler WM (formerly known as Waste Management), and three recycling groups called The Recycling Partnership, GreenBlue, and Closed Loop Partners. In a press release, they said that more than 60 percent of U.S. households can now recycle cold to-go cups in their curbside recycling bins. This makes the cups eligible for one of GreenBlue’s special labels featuring the familiar chasing arrows triangle and the words “widely recyclable. ”“To-go cups are entering a new era of recyclability,” the release said.

However, there’s a catch. Just because a product can be collected for recycling doesn’t mean it actually gets recycled. To imply otherwise is to conflate two very different numbers: the access rate and the real recycling rate. The former describes the number of people who are told they have “access” to a recycling program for a given product. The latter — the amount of plastic that is ultimately turned into new things — is what really matters, from an environmental standpoint. There’s not much evidence to suggest that the recycling rate for plastic cups is above 1 or 2 percent. “This is one of those situations where statistics can be very misleading,” said Alex Jordan, a plastics researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. “They can pull a statistic that would make the public think that all these things are being recycled, but unfortunately even if you clean and dry and put your recycling in the recycling bin and it gets picked up, the overwhelming likelihood is that it ends up in a landfill or being burned for energy generation.”

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The manager of one recycling center in California, who asked not to be named, said the cup announcement represents little more than a convenient alignment of interests: It generates good press and revenue for GreenBlue, allows WM to collect more material, and casts Starbucks as eco-friendly without requiring it to move away from single-use plastic. “Everyone wants that warm, fuzzy recyclable label,” the manager said, adding that they suspected there would be no buyers for polypropylene even if they advertised it widely. “Our phone would not ring. It’s not something there are a lot of mills out there that are buying.”

February’s announcement is part of a yearslong effort to increase polypropylene collection and recycling. Helming the effort is The Recycling Partnership, or TRP, a nonprofit funded by plastic-producing companies and their lobbying groups, including the American Chemistry Council, Exxon Mobil, and Coca-Cola. It started in 2020, just two years after China stopped accepting the United States’ plastic waste. At the time, polypropylene had a bit of an image problem. It was the second most common type of plastic in Americans’ municipal solid waste, but its recycling rate was far below that of other resins, at just 0.6 percent. (Polypropylene “containers and packaging” had a slightly higher rate of 2.7 percent.) Because cities could no longer ship their mixed plastic waste to China for reprocessing and there weren’t enough domestic facilities to sell it to, many stopped accepting all but the simplest products: bottles and jugs made of PET or HDPE, labeled with the numbers 1 and 2, respectively.

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https://grist.org/regulation/why-your-widely-recyclable-starbucks-cup-is-still-headed-for-the-landfill/