(ICN) WHEN RECYCLABLE DOESN'T MEAN 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.”

Jordan is one of several experts across government, academia, and industry who question the feasibility of recycling plastic cups. Polypropylene, the type of plastic Starbucks’ cups are made from, is ubiquitous in packaging and foodware but not in recycling facilities. It’s often contaminated with food or other types of plastic, difficult to sort, and expensive to process—so most recyclers don’t want it.

There “just aren’t a lot of recycling centers that want to accept polypropylene,” Jordan said.

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.” More of this publication (Inside Climate News) - link - more like this (cup recycling) - link - more like this (coffee) - link - more like this (polypropylene) - link