Many consumers trust that when they toss a plastic cup into a recycling bin at a restaurant or coffee shop, it will be recycled and turned into something new. However, a CBS News investigation uncovered that this isn’t always true.

CBS News investigated what happens at one of the largest users of plastic cups that advertises its recycling practices: Starbucks. Reporters placed plastic cold drink cups, embedded with trackers, into 57 labeled recycling bins at Starbucks locations across the country to see where the cups went. Only 36 provided reliable data. 

The trackers were superglued between two Starbucks cold drink plastic cups and CBS News monitored each tracker’s location multiple times a day until the trackers stopped moving. 

Of the 36 cups CBS News dropped, 32 did not go to a recycling facility. Fourteen cups were traced to landfills, five to incinerators, and thirteen to waste transfer stations, where trash is compacted before being sent to landfills or incinerators. Only four cups were traced to Material Recovery Facilities, where recyclables are sorted and prepared for reuse. 

While attaching a metal Bluetooth tracker to plastic and placing it in a recycling bin could contaminate the item and prevent it from being recycled, only four of the cups tagged by CBS News went to facilities that sort and remove this type of contamination, whereas the rest were immediately diverted for the landfill or incineration.

Two of the trackers revealed a surprising journey: one dropped at a Starbucks in New Jersey and another in Boston both traveled thousands of miles before ultimately ending up in the same landfill in Alabama. 

“When it comes to recycling, companies across the country and the world are lying about all these single-use plastics, saying they’re recyclable,” said Jan Dell, a former chemical engineer and founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit dedicated to combating plastic pollution. “They’re not telling the truth.”

The challenge of plastic waste

Americans produce more plastic waste each year than any other country – almost 500 pounds per person. Most of that plastic ends up as trash, according to a 2022 Greenpeace USA report, which revealed that the U.S. recycling rate for plastics is less than 6%.

Companies such as Starbucks, which sells beverages to more than 6 billion customers a year globally, are a major generator of plastic waste. More than 75% of Starbucks’ U.S. beverage sales are cold drinks, often served in plastic cups, but the company aims to reduce its overall waste by 50% by 2030. 

“Our goal for cups is that 100% of our customer-facing cups will be reusable, recyclable or compostable,” says Amelia Landers, vice president of innovation and solutions at Starbucks. Landers was part of the team that redesigned its cold plastic cups in April to be made with up to 20% less plastic, which she says will help divert more than 13 million pounds of plastic from landfills each year.

“There’s a guilt factor associated with using the single-use plastic, for maybe 20 minutes, and then having it exist in the landfill forever, or get incinerated and cause carbon emissions,” said Dell, which is one of the reasons she believes Starbucks encourages recycling in-store.

But making sure that Starbucks cup is recycled is harder than you might think. Unlike other recyclable materials such as glass, paper or aluminum, plastics are not uniform. Thousands of different types exist, each with unique characteristics, chemicals and additives, making sorting and recycling nearly impossible. For instance, certain beverage bottles cannot be recycled with food containers because they are made from different types of plastic, are different shapes and may be different colors.

Can Starbucks cups be recycled?

Consumers assume items like Starbucks cups can be recycled because of the arrows on the cup or blue bins in the store, but only 9% of Material Recovery Facilities sort the specific plastic that makes a Starbucks cup to be sold as recycled content and very few places actually buy that plastic to recycle it into new content. 

Starbucks cups are made out of polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic, and Landers told CBS News that these cups are designed to be recyclable and there are facilities that do this in the U.S. CBS News asked Starbucks to send a list of companies that recycle No. 5 plastic beverage cups. They sent a list of four facilities: three that collected and sorted No. 5 plastics, but only one company, KW Plastics in Alabama, recycles No. 5 cups into new plastic items.

KW Plastics is one of a handful of facilities in America that recycles No. 5 plastics into new material, but of the 160,000 tons of plastic waste made up of No. 5 cups and plates generated in the U.S. each year, less than 1% is recycled, according to the latest EPA report on plastic recycling. 

A reusable solution

Starbucks officials say they can only control what happens inside the company’s stores, and work with outside partners to ensure its waste ends up in the right place.

“We’re working to increase the recycle capture of the plastic cups so that the recyclability has higher potential,” says Landers. Her team is currently testing new cup materials and models to encourage reusable cups both in the store, and for customers to take away. 

“The more we can offer customers to sit and stay, that takes a tremendous amount of single-use cups out of the landfill entirely,” she says. 

Starbucks was the first major retailer to roll out a nationwide program where customers can provide their own cup for mobile and drive-thru orders earlier this year. 

“We have tested over 30 different borrow-a-cup models around the world, and there is a lot to learn and a lot to solve,” says Landers.

Governments can also provide incentives for businesses to innovate by eliminating unnecessary plastics and encouraging reusable products. “Regulation is absolutely critical as well as enforcement,” said Dell, with The Last Beach Cleanup. 

Prohibitions on single-use plastics are becoming more common. Last week the Miami-Dade County Commissions approved a resolution to eliminate single-use plastics at municipal buildings, which include the Miami Zoo and the airport. 

Dell says customers can be critical in pushing for change. “They can demand that companies be honest,” she said. “Secondly, they can choose with their pocketbooks and bring back in a reusable cup.”