An environmental nonprofit reported on Wednesday that single-use plastic cups served in U.S. Starbucks cafes are not being recycled at the rates implied by the company's in-store labeling. Beyond Plastics said it placed location trackers on 36 polypropylene cups earlier this year and deposited them in recycling bins inside Starbucks locations across the United States.
According to the group's account, none of the tracked cups were recorded as arriving at a recycling facility. Instead, 33 of the cups were last located in landfills, incinerators, or on routes toward those endpoints. The remaining three were last detected in sorting facilities.
The polypropylene cups display a recycling icon and are shown as recyclable on in-store recycling receptacles. Earlier this year, in February, Starbucks announced that its polypropylene cups had been designated "widely recyclable" in the United States by a labeling organization, How2Recycle.
A Starbucks spokesperson on Wednesday said the company questioned the methodology used by Beyond Plastics, but did not provide further details about the nature of those concerns.
Industry organizations, including the Association of Plastic Recyclers which represents mechanical recyclers, have raised the possibility that the tracking devices themselves could alter how discarded items are processed and may lead to diversion away from recycling streams. Beyond Plastics’ study notes the tracking results without attributing the outcomes to any single factor beyond the locations where the tracked items were last observed.
The Starbucks spokesperson emphasized that recycling outcomes are dependent on the capabilities of local waste management and recycling infrastructure. The spokesperson said this variability is why Starbucks collaborates with recycling companies and other partners to try to expand access and improve system performance.
Starbucks previously set a 2020 commitment to ensure 100% of its customer packaging would be reusable, recyclable or compostable by the end of the decade. In 2024 the company allowed U.S. customers to bring their own cups for mobile and drive-through orders. Under CEO Brian Niccol, the company follows a policy of serving in-store customers in reusable ceramic mugs; nevertheless, Beyond Plastics says many customers served inside stores continue to receive plastic cups.
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former official at the Environmental Protection Agency, urged Starbucks to stop labeling its plastic polypropylene cups as recyclable and to move the company toward fiber-based cups, a switch the group says Starbucks has already made in some markets. Enck asserted that such a transition would represent "one of the most significant plastic-reduction corporate policies in the world."
The group also noted broader market pressures on plastics. The Iran war has driven up prices worldwide for plastics, which are made from oil or natural gas, Reuters reported in April. Beyond Plastics added that the recycling rate for plastics in the United States is under 6%, and that much of current recycling activity does not involve polypropylene - a material for which the group says there are relatively few processing facilities equipped to recycle it.
The report and the company response come amid wider questions about how packaging claims translate into real-world material flows, and about the role of local infrastructure and material-specific processing capacity in determining recycling outcomes.
Separately, the article noted a retail investing product that evaluates Starbucks stock. The product, ProPicks AI, assesses SBUX alongside thousands of companies using more than 100 financial metrics, and the material quoted past winners such as Super Micro Computer with a reported gain of 185% and AppLovin with a reported gain of 157% as examples of its previous selections. The product description referenced marketing language about pricing and strategy offerings.
Contact and follow-up: The differing accounts from Beyond Plastics and Starbucks leave open questions about how representative the tracked sample is of overall material flows, and about how tracking methods might affect processing - issues noted by industry groups and by the Starbucks spokesperson.