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 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.
> 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.
The study looks more like an advocacy stunt than a rigorous audit, but it still points at a real problem: recyclability labels often describe theoretical acceptance, not likely end fate
> Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility.
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.
Yeah when you see `-able` suffix the implied presumption is that it isn't happening. And if you are familiar with the green-washing of the plastics industry in the US, and the economics of the recycling infrastructure of the US, you already knew this was the case, as is the case for most plastic.
Highly recommend this podcast for those who still spend time sorting plastic into their recycling bin:
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 that doesn't come from behind the counter. I encourage trying it, especially if you visit the same coffee shop habitually like I do.
I wonder how much of it comes down to inconvenience. I've been bringing my own thermos for a year or so now and it took me some time to get used to the ritual of scrubbing it with soap and a bottle brush after use every day - at first I found it inconvenient enough that it made me want to just get paper cups.
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.
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.
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.
But does Seattle actually recycle all the plastic numbers? There are a number of places where all plastic numbers are accepted in the bin, but some (and sometimes all, depending on market conditions) of them are thrown into the trash later. The logic is that, overall, plastic recycling can be increased by not requiring people to decipher the codes.
Visited a recycling facility recently. It’s a private company that covers an entire county in California. They filter the garbage wit people and a big machine and seem to get paid by companies abroad to ship them all recyclable materials - plastics, cardboard, metals, glass. That pays enough to keep them in business for decades. Someone really needs to look at where the materials from our garbage go.
I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.
I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.
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".
It's 100% recycling, if the alternative was just "throw away the excess". For all practical purposes, recycling just means "repurposing material that you would have otherwise sent to a landfill".
My understanding is that glass gets downcycled into a lot of products like concrete or asphalt or aggregates. It's not profitable, but it's really easy to provide at a low loss.
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't that much too.
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.
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.
Also celluloid (made from cellulose), which I was pretty surprised to learn is about 170 years old. Plastics from oil were mostly invented after WWI and took off during WWII, but they had some kinds before that.
My local Starbucks has 2 bins for recyclables and trash with little images about what to put in each bin. Many customers look at them, think, and put them in the right bin. Most just throw them in the middle trash bin.
At the end of the night, all three bins go into the same dumpster, they recycle nothing there.
I'm a recycling critic, but no, it shouldn't -- because while the market for recycling feed fluctuates, consumer habits take decades to change. If we come up for an excellent recycling solution for plastics in the next 20 years, but we have to re-build municipal recycling programs for scratch, it'll be 80 years before it's going at full steam.
Also some material like aluminum are very valuable to recycle even if we're throwing plastic in the trash.
Most recycling in retail contexts is pure theater either way, so why expend the effort to actually separate streams that will inevitable be combined later.
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 greasy" (unclear how greasy "too greasy" is).
IIRC any grease is considered a contaminate. So any cardboard with grease splotching should be discarded instead of recycled.
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.
> 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 items to other things. Both are excellent lines and are not more expensive than their usual wares.
> 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.
I've seen articles lately about the sand becoming harder (more expensive) to get. Even though it is abundant, it is not necessarily clean. It still needs to be refined similar to other raw ores. If the glass has already been made, I would expect the contaminants are easier to eliminate from crushing and melting it back down.
Not sure. I've never really read the articles. The headlines tend to be from sites that lean a little further that I'm willing to read normally. Search assist AI suggested it was even for glass bottles, but I don't trust anything an AI suggests as it could be sourcing from the same places.
That's what I thought as well! I was surprised, and a little bit annoyed, to learn that they would prefer we throw away anything glass rather than recycle it.
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 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.
At least pizza boxes can go in the yard waste bin to be taken to the industrial composter. My yard waste bin came with a sticker that actively encourages putting food soiled paper in it.
You say that like that's a thing available every where. it's not. I compost my lawn clippings and food scraps, but I don't go so far as to put in cardboard type stuff in there. As for the greasy parts, it's usually just the bottom, so I've ripped off the top for adding to recycle and trashed the greasy part. But even that's more than most people would be willing to do
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.
Wow, surprising that it was zero. Is there a chance that the cup was being separated from the tracker at a sorting facility with the cup going to a different destination than the tracker?
they said they had 53 trackers and only 36 "returned usable data" so theoretically some of those unaccounted for 17 could have been recycled... I mean they don't know what happened to them. I think they could have at least highlighted that in the article.
I've heard of this before. Activists put trackers on recyclables and the automatic sorter removes them because they have metal, and the activist gets outraged that the item went to the trash.
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.
Though specifically they would have welcomed sorted recyclables, but for whatever reason the US seemed entirely unable to correctly label the goods being shipped and were just shipping mixed trash and claiming it was something else.
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.
Would they? Aluminum needs a lot of energy to melt and then reform into something new. Since the alloy is not known they need to refine the different metals out just to ensure that they get the correct alloy for the user. Mining Al uses a lot more energy.
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.
I've wondered about this because I've heard the same thing from my partner - in Engineering school in Spain, she was told that waste aluminium as a building material should be avoided because it was so expensive to recycle. But we recycle aluminium here in New Zealand - perhaps it's something to do with being able to use green energy at night (New Zealand has abundant hydro power)?
Al uses a lot of energy. Recycling is much less than uses to get it from mining.
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.
Aluminium is a really bad container for aciduous food stuff. You need a good plastic liner in the cans to handle it. So it is absolutely not a perfect container.
All this greenwashing effort by big brands are laughable. The cost of actually recycle any used cups would far exceed the cost to manufacture them. When just the act of using those cups has already give them all the "environmentally aware" credit, why would they bother follow through with the rest of the process.
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.
When I bring my thermos to a coffee shop, brew the beverage in their own mixer before pouring it in my thermos. There is exactly no contact between their equipment and my container, beside the barista hands (which they should periodically wash anyway) and between the butt of the thermos and the table. Also most of them give the thermos a few rinses & wash with the soapy water jet thingy before pouring.
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 think you and your environment are very different from the average consumer. At least in the office there's a shared community. I think you'd shudder to see what comes to the Starbucks/Dunkin drivethru.
> It's time for Starbucks to stop making misleading recycling claims and start prioritizing plastic-free, preferably reusable, alternatives for its customers.
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 I am being extremely generous I think the key word there is prioritizing. It's a moving goalpost. Could mean "allow you to bring your own cup" or "advertise you can bring your own cup" or "offer a discount for bringing your own cup".
Fair. It's definitely too broad of a statement and I feel like calling out the reusable cup policy that Starbucks already has would be more helpful. The current statement reads like there is no alternative whatsoever and you're forced to dump plastic into the ocean if you get a drink from there.
There are some recycling bins in Jackson Wyoming that make clear what a scam the standard recycling bin is. Different bins for different color glass, no labels, purified, etc.
Recycling is largely a scheme to make people feel better about themselves without actually meaningfully addressing their environmental impact.
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.
I don't think calling it a scheme to make people feel better is fair. Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle; a portion of it does get recycled in the end. As for whether or not people use it to absolve themselves of environmental guilt in other aspects of their lives, I personally doubt a significant number ever consider whether or not they recycle when choosing to eat a burger, buy a big house or crank the heat.
> Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle; a portion of it does get recycled in the end.
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)
> Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle
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.
> Recycling is largely a scheme to make people feel better about themselves
No, it's a scheme to stave off taxes on plastic packaging, or regulations to mandate glass. What 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.
If I remember correctly, US per capita CO2 footprint is around 14 tonnes (this includes industrial activity). Average US driver of an ICE vehicle produces around 4 tonnes of CO2 per year.
I think the second half of your argument is missing. How much of that CO2 emission is even in my control? What is capital doing to reduce its end of output? What sort of mechanisms do I even have to control the economy? I can't stop american companies from selling out my grandkid's future. My parents couldn't either. Our economy is simply not structured to reflect collective interest. If you vote for a political party that does want to take this seriously, you get accused of supporting fascism.
I'm not going to sweat recycling while our entire political economy makes a farce of caring about the future.
Your efforts cascade. You alone mean nothing, but states and companies are just reacting to the collective wants, so if everyone waits for everyone else first nothing will happen.
The best way for one to reduce their carbon footprint is to stop supporting large corporations. Unfortunately this involves not being lazy and we are lazy.
> The best way for one to reduce their carbon footprint is to stop supporting large corporations.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
The study looks more like an advocacy stunt than a rigorous audit, but it still points at a real problem: recyclability labels often describe theoretical acceptance, not likely end fate
Burning paper is not the same as burning plastic.
and paper in a landfill is just fine.
Carbon negative, in fact!
> not actually recycled but turned into fossil fuels or feedstocks
This is such a great claim.
Turning plastics back into their feedstocks is literally the most straightforward form of recycling.
> Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility.
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.
If you look at the raw data they provided, more than half of them just stop transmitting while on the highway.
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.
Yet it still seems like decent evidence that the consumer-facing story is much simpler than the actual recycling path
Yeah when you see `-able` suffix the implied presumption is that it isn't happening. And if you are familiar with the green-washing of the plastics industry in the US, and the economics of the recycling infrastructure of the US, you already knew this was the case, as is the case for most plastic.
Highly recommend this podcast for those who still spend time sorting plastic into their recycling bin:
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/22/1094267292/planet-money-waste...
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 that doesn't come from behind the counter. I encourage trying it, especially if you visit the same coffee shop habitually like I do.
I think the habit/friction part is underrated
I wonder how much of it comes down to inconvenience. I've been bringing my own thermos for a year or so now and it took me some time to get used to the ritual of scrubbing it with soap and a bottle brush after use every day - at first I found it inconvenient enough that it made me want to just get paper cups.
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.
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 says it because a retailer- and packaging-industry-backed organization says it: https://greenblue.org/2024/01/04/the-how2recycle-guide-to-re...
There is no actual oversight from the FTC or related organization for recyclability product labels.
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.
But does Seattle actually recycle all the plastic numbers? There are a number of places where all plastic numbers are accepted in the bin, but some (and sometimes all, depending on market conditions) of them are thrown into the trash later. The logic is that, overall, plastic recycling can be increased by not requiring people to decipher the codes.
Visited a recycling facility recently. It’s a private company that covers an entire county in California. They filter the garbage wit people and a big machine and seem to get paid by companies abroad to ship them all recyclable materials - plastics, cardboard, metals, glass. That pays enough to keep them in business for decades. Someone really needs to look at where the materials from our garbage go.
I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.
I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.
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".
It's 100% recycling, if the alternative was just "throw away the excess". For all practical purposes, recycling just means "repurposing material that you would have otherwise sent to a landfill".
My understanding is that glass gets downcycled into a lot of products like concrete or asphalt or aggregates. It's not profitable, but it's really easy to provide at a low loss.
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't that much too.
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.
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.
Also celluloid (made from cellulose), which I was pretty surprised to learn is about 170 years old. Plastics from oil were mostly invented after WWI and took off during WWII, but they had some kinds before that.
My local Starbucks has 2 bins for recyclables and trash with little images about what to put in each bin. Many customers look at them, think, and put them in the right bin. Most just throw them in the middle trash bin.
At the end of the night, all three bins go into the same dumpster, they recycle nothing there.
My gut feeling is this should be illegal. It's something like false advertising.
It is questionable, I assume they are using standard corporate products and our local rural-ish area does not have very good options.
It should also be illegal when municipalities do it.
Just because the city offers a recycling pickup, doesn't mean most of it actually gets recycled.
I'm a recycling critic, but no, it shouldn't -- because while the market for recycling feed fluctuates, consumer habits take decades to change. If we come up for an excellent recycling solution for plastics in the next 20 years, but we have to re-build municipal recycling programs for scratch, it'll be 80 years before it's going at full steam.
Also some material like aluminum are very valuable to recycle even if we're throwing plastic in the trash.
Most recycling in retail contexts is pure theater either way, so why expend the effort to actually separate streams that will inevitable be combined later.
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 greasy" (unclear how greasy "too greasy" is).
IIRC any grease is considered a contaminate. So any cardboard with grease splotching should be discarded instead of recycled.
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 takes as much energy if not more than just making new.
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...
> 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 items to other things. Both are excellent lines and are not more expensive than their usual wares.
> 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.
I've seen articles lately about the sand becoming harder (more expensive) to get. Even though it is abundant, it is not necessarily clean. It still needs to be refined similar to other raw ores. If the glass has already been made, I would expect the contaminants are easier to eliminate from crushing and melting it back down.
Talking out of my ass, but I think that's only for concrete right? Same reason saudi arabia imports sand for their construction projects.
Not sure. I've never really read the articles. The headlines tend to be from sites that lean a little further that I'm willing to read normally. Search assist AI suggested it was even for glass bottles, but I don't trust anything an AI suggests as it could be sourcing from the same places.
> 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.
That's what I thought as well! I was surprised, and a little bit annoyed, to learn that they would prefer we throw away anything glass rather than recycle it.
Only if there is a local glass processing facility + consumer (e.g. large brewery, etc) is it worthwhile.
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.
Glass is 30% cheaper to make from recycled glass.
But transport and sorting (glass is hard and sharp) eat into that margin, so presort
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 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.
At least pizza boxes can go in the yard waste bin to be taken to the industrial composter. My yard waste bin came with a sticker that actively encourages putting food soiled paper in it.
You say that like that's a thing available every where. it's not. I compost my lawn clippings and food scraps, but I don't go so far as to put in cardboard type stuff in there. As for the greasy parts, it's usually just the bottom, so I've ripped off the top for adding to recycle and trashed the greasy part. But even that's more than most people would be willing to do
if only I had one in my area... where they exist use them, but they don't exit in a lot of places.
Strange, ours explicitly called out pizza boxes as being recyclable. I wonder what the difference is.
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.
Corporations aren't recycling the stuff they say they are recycling.
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.
The distinction between "accepted for recycling" and "actually recycled" is doing a lot of work here
Wow, surprising that it was zero. Is there a chance that the cup was being separated from the tracker at a sorting facility with the cup going to a different destination than the tracker?
they said they had 53 trackers and only 36 "returned usable data" so theoretically some of those unaccounted for 17 could have been recycled... I mean they don't know what happened to them. I think they could have at least highlighted that in the article.
I've heard of this before. Activists put trackers on recyclables and the automatic sorter removes them because they have metal, and the activist gets outraged that the item went to the trash.
Glass is easily recyclable if you want to- my country has been doing so since the 1970s. Metals also. Paper no problemo.
Plastics? You're fucked. There's no money in it. Takes too much efffort. Contamination with food.
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.
Asia stopped taking our semi-recyclable waste a few years back, which is how all this greenwashing was exposed
Though specifically they would have welcomed sorted recyclables, but for whatever reason the US seemed entirely unable to correctly label the goods being shipped and were just shipping mixed trash and claiming it was something else.
Does your municipality offer composting? That's where a lot of my waste paper ends up.
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.
Would they? Aluminum needs a lot of energy to melt and then reform into something new. Since the alloy is not known they need to refine the different metals out just to ensure that they get the correct alloy for the user. Mining Al uses a lot more energy.
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.
I've wondered about this because I've heard the same thing from my partner - in Engineering school in Spain, she was told that waste aluminium as a building material should be avoided because it was so expensive to recycle. But we recycle aluminium here in New Zealand - perhaps it's something to do with being able to use green energy at night (New Zealand has abundant hydro power)?
Al uses a lot of energy. Recycling is much less than uses to get it from mining.
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.
I'm finding info of just 5% from a scrap ingot:
https://aluminium-guide.com/aluminium-alloys-food-beverage-c...
Aluminium is a really bad container for aciduous food stuff. You need a good plastic liner in the cans to handle it. So it is absolutely not a perfect container.
The problem is the packaging not the recycling.
Recycling has largely been a virtue signal act for decades.
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.
All this greenwashing effort by big brands are laughable. The cost of actually recycle any used cups would far exceed the cost to manufacture them. When just the act of using those cups has already give them all the "environmentally aware" credit, why would they bother follow through with the rest of the process.
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.
Bringing your own is a health hazard. It spreads germs all over the equipment.
When I bring my thermos to a coffee shop, brew the beverage in their own mixer before pouring it in my thermos. There is exactly no contact between their equipment and my container, beside the barista hands (which they should periodically wash anyway) and between the butt of the thermos and the table. Also most of them give the thermos a few rinses & wash with the soapy water jet thingy before pouring.
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 think you and your environment are very different from the average consumer. At least in the office there's a shared community. I think you'd shudder to see what comes to the Starbucks/Dunkin drivethru.
I don't mind the downvotes but, what? No responsible company is going to want a bunch of unused cups interacting with their gear.
> It's time for Starbucks to stop making misleading recycling claims and start prioritizing plastic-free, preferably reusable, alternatives for its customers.
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 I am being extremely generous I think the key word there is prioritizing. It's a moving goalpost. Could mean "allow you to bring your own cup" or "advertise you can bring your own cup" or "offer a discount for bringing your own cup".
Fair. It's definitely too broad of a statement and I feel like calling out the reusable cup policy that Starbucks already has would be more helpful. The current statement reads like there is no alternative whatsoever and you're forced to dump plastic into the ocean if you get a drink from there.
There are some recycling bins in Jackson Wyoming that make clear what a scam the standard recycling bin is. Different bins for different color glass, no labels, purified, etc.
Recycling is largely a scheme to make people feel better about themselves without actually meaningfully addressing their environmental impact.
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.
I don't think calling it a scheme to make people feel better is fair. Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle; a portion of it does get recycled in the end. As for whether or not people use it to absolve themselves of environmental guilt in other aspects of their lives, I personally doubt a significant number ever consider whether or not they recycle when choosing to eat a burger, buy a big house or crank the heat.
> Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle; a portion of it does get recycled in the end.
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)
> Grand scheme of things, you'd do more "harm" to the planet (however minuscule on the personal level) by choosing not to recycle than choosing to recycle
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.
> If you care about the environment, BY FAR the most important thing you can do is reducing your carbon footprint.
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).
> Recycling is largely a scheme to make people feel better about themselves
No, it's a scheme to stave off taxes on plastic packaging, or regulations to mandate glass. What 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.
Surely there's no point in reducing your personal carbon footprint without holding capital accountable at the state level.
If I remember correctly, US per capita CO2 footprint is around 14 tonnes (this includes industrial activity). Average US driver of an ICE vehicle produces around 4 tonnes of CO2 per year.
Personal choices matter.
I think the second half of your argument is missing. How much of that CO2 emission is even in my control? What is capital doing to reduce its end of output? What sort of mechanisms do I even have to control the economy? I can't stop american companies from selling out my grandkid's future. My parents couldn't either. Our economy is simply not structured to reflect collective interest. If you vote for a political party that does want to take this seriously, you get accused of supporting fascism.
I'm not going to sweat recycling while our entire political economy makes a farce of caring about the future.
Your efforts cascade. You alone mean nothing, but states and companies are just reacting to the collective wants, so if everyone waits for everyone else first nothing will happen.
> states and companies are just reacting to the collective wants
Insanely naive take. They react to capital.
The best way for one to reduce their carbon footprint is to stop supporting large corporations. Unfortunately this involves not being lazy and we are lazy.
> The best way for one to reduce their carbon footprint is to stop supporting large corporations.
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.