Starbucks and other coffee shop cups aren’t recyclable, Estimated 60 billion paper cups in the US end up in landfills each year, Thin layer of plastic inside
Granny says: “Waste not want not.”
From CNN Money.
“Love coffee but care about the environment?
Then you may have a dilemma. An estimated 60 billion paper cups in the U.S. end up in landfills every year because they can’t be recycled easily. That includes cups sold by all major coffee chains. But Starbucks, the market leader, may have found a solution.
Campaigners have long been pushing for retailers to start using more sustainable cups, or at least come clean about the impact their cups have on the environment.
Several major chains in the U.K., including Starbucks (SBUX), McDonald’s (MCD), KFC and Pret a Manger signed a “Paper Cup Manifesto” last month, pledging to step up efforts to boost recycling rates.
On Wednesday, Starbucks agreed to take the issue further and test a new fully recyclable kind of coffee cup in the U.K.
The cups are made from recycled paper by British packaging company Frugalpac, which pitched the idea to Starbucks. A plastic liner is only lightly bonded onto the paper after the cup’s shape is formed. The design allows the plastic lining to be easily separated in a recycling plant — the liner gets stuck in the filters, while the cardboard goes through and can be recycled and used again, up to seven times, mostly to print newspapers.”
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/21/news/starbucks-recyclable-cups/