Starbucks is serious about making recycling an integral part of its stores’ activity. “By 2015, we plan to have recycling available in all of our stores where we control waste collection and serve 25% of beverages in reusable cups,” stated the global coffee retailer last year, and now it is making small steps towards the huge goal. This summer, the brand hold the Betacup competition sourcing customer-generated ideas focused on reusable, recyclable or compostable cups, and this time the Starbucks is into nine-week tests of its recycling initiative in NYC.
If successful, it will help send 3 billion cups annually to paper mills instead of landfills. The current ‘demo’-period started in mid-September and will be running through November. Under this initiative, the company is recycling only the cups themselves and does not deal with other elements of packaging like lids or sleeves. Starbucks encourages the public to throw the empty cups into 86 in-store recycling for-cups-only bins installed at NYC Starbucks venues back in September. «We are testing the capability of the infrastructure to handle and accept our cups in the system,» said Jim Hanna, Starbucks’ director of environmental impact. “We believe the cups in their current form provide a valuable recycling commodity…and we just need to prove that.”
According to GreenBiz, the process of turning used Starbucks, which contain 10% of recycled material, into paper towels, packaging, printing or toilet paper, etc., is the following: they together with other cardboard trash are put out on the edge of pavement each night, from where they are taken by a recycling hauler of Starbucks. After that, they ‘head’ to the material recovery facilities to be sorted out, sent to paper mill SFK and become useful paper-based products.
The results of the pilot program will be announced in November, and will show how many cups were thrown to the dedicated bins and how many of them ended up in the garbage in the streets. This will help the company improve its further strategy of gathering used coffee drinks containers. To date, 80% of them leave Starbucks stores.