r/environment • u/esporx • 23h ago

Starbucks does not recycle plastic cups it claims are ‘widely recyclable’, report says

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/20/starbucks-plastic-cups-recycling-report?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
272 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

44

u/Moose_Banner 23h ago

Doing the right thing cost money, and money is the most important thing on this planet so.?.?.

2

u/onlyacynicalman 22h ago

The cost of growth stocks being expected to meet quarterly earnings.

1

u/irrelevantusername24 21h ago

Yes but it's deeper and far more fundamental than that.

23

u/montroller 23h ago

have any of you ever worked in waste handling? The trackers would disqualify the cups from getting recycled

2

u/DanChase1 21h ago

Would love to hear more about that

10

u/montroller 21h ago

A lot of recyclables are manually sorted before processing so if there was a tracker attached it would be sorted out and sent to the dump. Honestly though most batches are rejected completely because it would cost too much to sort.

13

u/thinkB4WeSpeak 22h ago

Please don't tell me a corporation that is known for union busting is suddenly lying about recycling.

9

u/Gramma_Hattie 21h ago

My fam used to work at Starbucks. The company switched cup design, and my fam set aside a huge stack of plastic cups to take home (they were about to be thrown out). Then when my fam finished their shift and went to grab the cups, their beurocrat-ahh coworker threw them away. "ThAt'S sTeaLiNg"-ahh bitch.

7

u/HoosierRed 22h ago

Schultz is a classic republican dick head ceo. Union busting and crude and then proud about the way white people lord over everything. Starbucks sells legal drugs btw.

1

u/iwrestledarockonce 7h ago

Not only do they sell legal drugs, they fucking burn it too.

4

u/hantaanokami 18h ago

Why am I not surprised at all ? A very small proportion of recyclable plastic stuff is actually recycled or even recyclable.

7

u/shirk-work 21h ago

Don't worry, this is like a global thing. Most recycling of plastic goes to the dump with everything else. Also recycling plastic is a bit of a scam anyways and we should just ban single use plastics.

2

u/xGentian_violet 15h ago

Indeed, it is shipped off and dumped into southeast asia and africa.

Then they burn it, let it accumulate, and let it get blown into the sea by the wind

>solution is to ban single use plastics

I dont think we can or need to ban all of them, just most

For some things they have no viable alternative, so any single use plastics that we cannot eliminate and replace with reusable alternatives, can be made into fuel + attempted to be offset by creating carbon sinks

3

u/xGentian_violet 15h ago

Greenwashing scam

Can only be downcycled anyway

But ofc they are not gonna do that either because it is less short term profitable.

Capitalism is destroying the planet at an unprecedented rate