Tracking Where Starbucks Disposable Cups Actually End Up When Recycling | KCAL investigations

Starbucks is one of the largest consumers of single-use plastic cups in the United States, and despite the company asking its customers to throw their empty cups in the trash, CBS News has found that this rarely happens.

These cups make up some of the 97 billion pounds of plastic waste Americans generate each year. This is an important factor for two Orange County women and their goal to find out where the cups actually end up.

Susan Keefe and her partner wake up early and are ahead of the baristas with the first pours as they wait for garbage trucks to pick up local Starbucks locations.

She says she felt it was necessary to address what she considered a personal matter.

“I needed data, I needed evidence,” says the former high-tech manager.

Keefe has been collecting the plastic cups Starbucks uses for its iced drinks, which account for about 75% of its sales, for months. After sticking the trackers into the bottom of the cups, she throws them straight back into the world-famous café’s recycling bins.

From there she tracks their journey by phone and follows the trucks to where they unload their load. She lost some tracking devices and even some trucks she tracked during her lengthy investigation, but in the end, she says, she figured out exactly where the recyclables actually ended up.

In most cases, she followed trucks to a landfill in Orange County, which is the opposite of ideal.

“This is the last place,” she said when asked where the plastic should go.

Are customers being lied to?

Jan Dell is a retired chemical engineer who says almost no companies actually recycle the type of plastic typically used in single-use products like Starbucks.

“They’re being deceived…they’re being lied to,” Dell said of customers who think they’re doing the right thing by recycling their cups after use. “Totally lied to. These are not recyclable, there are no factories that want them.”

Dell says this particular type of plastic cannot be shredded and turned back into a cup because it becomes “toxic, gray and smelly.”

Five months ago she came up with the idea of ​​digging through dumpsters and figuring out where the cups end up.

“If I don’t do it, no one will,” Dell said. “Just lying… And it’s provable, right?”

Dell and Keefe tracked 12 recycled cups and sent them to landfills in four different states.

While conducting an experiment to see what might prove their theory, KCAL News’ Ross Palombo also dropped a cup with a tracker on it at a Starbucks location in East Los Angeles.

It was tracked a mile and a half to a waste transfer center, which Dell says is just another stop on the way to a landfill.

At another cup drop in Hollywood, the same thing was evident when the GPS-tampered item was followed over 13 miles to a waste transfer center in Sun Valley that also serves as a materials recovery facility.

Palombo dropped a third cup in Beverly Hills that landed 18 miles away, again at Athens Services, a materials recovery facility in Sun Valley.

When Palombo spoke with an employee at the facility, he discovered that the plastic items are recovered and shipped instead of melted down.

According to Dell, it is very unlikely that the product could have been recycled there.

“There are no factories that want to buy it,” she said.

Chasing trophies across the country

CBS News investigative teams across the country dropped cups into 57 marked Starbucks recycling bins in 18 cities across the country.

They were able to find possible locations for 36 of these drops, only four of which were pinged at locations that appeared to be recovery facilities.

Thirteen ended up at waste transfer stations, five at incineration sites and 14 at what appeared to be landfills.

“This is unacceptable,” said Starbucks manager Amelia Landers. “It’s disappointing.”

Still, officials insist their cups can actually be recycled. They say mixed material or possible contamination, a system beyond their control, are possible explanations for why they don’t end up where they’re supposed to.

“There are a number of things that prevent a recyclable cup from getting where it’s supposed to,” Landers said. “Once it leaves our branches, there is a landlord, a building owner and other tenants in the building. There’s an infrastructure that takes that away and it’s largely outside of Starbucks.”

CBS News also tracked a plastic cup being recycled at a site in Erewhon. It was most recently pinged near a landfill in Rialto. Plastic bags were dropped at a Home Depot, all of which ended up in a landfill in the Antelope Valley.

Dell isn’t surprised by the revelation.

“The vast majority of plastics are not recyclable,” she said, claiming that only 5% of plastics in the United States are actually recycled properly.

She says single-use plastics are the most wasteful item.

“They are one of many, but they are at the top of the pyramid,” Dell said. “They are proactively propagating a lie in their stores. …It’s their product, their trash can, in their store. This is a claim, a legal claim to the public that the thing should be recycled.”

When asked if they are violating California state law?

“I think they are,” she said.

Starbucks denies this.

“To the extent that we can influence and ensure that these trophies end up where they are intended, we will try to do that. But it’s a shared responsibility,” says Landers.

None of these responses prevent Dell from continuing its work.

“My ultimate goal is to get companies to stop lying about plastics,” she said. “And empty those shelves.”

She and Keefe say all of their work is exactly what it takes to bring the truth to light.

“Unfortunately, I think this is evidence that a giant company the size of Starbucks is deceiving its customers,” Keefe said.

The investigation is ongoing

Although plastic cups have been detected in nearly 20 cities across the U.S., Starbucks is a global company and CBS News’ investigation only affects a fraction of its stores. The results of the investigation do not provide any information about the entire chain.

Home Depot says all plastic bags are recyclable and the GPS tracker may have been discarded by employees who threw it into a separate bin.

Erewhon says their cups are also sorted as thoroughly as possible and that their material is recyclable.

Athens, the facility where some of the cups ended up, says the product is recyclable but declined to tell KCAL News exactly where that happens or which company does the recycling.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery does not have a list of companies that recycle the single-use plastic used by Starbucks.

As for the recyclables — a plastic bottle and an aluminum can — that Palombo placed in trash cans at the CBS Broadcast Center in Studio City, the bottle ended up in a recycling center in South Los Angeles, while the can was last pinged in the city two weeks ago in the same location, meaning it may have been shredded in the recycling process.