Editor’s note: This multi-part series explores a report from Beyond Plastics about the recyclability claims for polypropylene cold drink cups from Starbucks. In Part 2, the recycling industry responds to the group’s allegations. Part 3 unpacks the data gathered in the study. For this story, Beyond Plastics did not respond to several attempts to gain clarity about its methods and results.
Every so often, an NGO issues a scathing report about an industry or a specific high-profile corporation, mainstream news outlets pick it up and consumers find the results on the Internet for years to come.
And while differences of perception, context or even opinion certainly exist, one point is undeniable: Plastic pollution and recycling remain significant issues globally with no easy answers.
While a recent report from anti-plastics group Beyond Plastics on Starbucks’ recyclability claims about its polypropylene (PP) cold-drink cups may have raised at least as many questions as it attempted to answer, it also provides an opportunity for meaningful dialogue to improve processes and influence consumer behavior.
Steve Alexander, CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), pointed out that such studies highlight the heightened challenges of collecting recyclable commodities in retail settings, in which contamination and inconsistent sorting and handling are common. APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., publisher of Plastics Recycling Update.
“This study is not about whether polypropylene is recyclable,” he said. “PP meets recyclability criteria in California and many other states,” and the US has significant capacity today to process additional polypropylene.
Instead, the report offered perhaps unexpected insight. “In actuality, the report highlights an opportunity to improve collection and recovery programs for recyclables across both businesses and households,” Alexander said.
So let’s take a look at what most if not all stakeholders can agree on.
More can be done to improve recycling outcomes
Few recyclers would argue that there’s vast room for improvement in both packaging recovery rates and in recycled content adoption. As Alexander said, US PP processing capacity is more than sufficient, but end markets and brand commitments are the missing piece to making recycling a sustainable business model, so to speak.
As the target of the report, Starbucks said recycling outcomes depend on the broader system – local infrastructure, contamination levels, consumer participation – and noted that these factors extend beyond any single company. The company said it is focusing on what is within its control, including the goals of the NextGen Consortium it helped launch in 2018.
Along with McDonald’s, Starbucks is a founding member of the consortium through Closed Loop Partners. The group’s priorities are to improve access to recycling, invest in innovation to strengthen recovery systems and advance reusable and alternative packaging solutions to reduce waste aims.
Earlier this year, Starbucks announced its PP cold drink cups had earned the “widely recyclable” label from How2Recycle, indicating that 60% of households have access to curbside recycling for the cup. The announcement came a few months after hauler WM announced it had added to-go drink cups, including ones made of PP, to its accepted materials list for curbside recycling, in anticipation of the “widely recyclable” designation.
Despite the achievement, the company said at the time: “While this milestone reflects meaningful progress, more work lies ahead to expand access for even more consumers across the US. Ongoing engagement will help residents include these items in their recyclables and strengthen the system for the future. Reaching 60% access is a big step forward but not the finish line.”
Starbucks has stated that 75% of its beverages are served in cold cups, which is why the company continues to work toward designing for recyclability, alongside its other initiatives including refill/reuse.
On the hauler side, WM told Plastics Recycling Update it had increased PP recovery for recycling by around 150% from 2019 to 2025, as its facility upgrades and new MRFs brought the total of optical sorters from 30 in 2012 to about 475 today. WM added that in 2019 to 2025 it recovered about 200 million pounds of PP for recycling.
Even so, in March 2025, Closed Loop Partners published data indicating high volumes of food-grade PP in recycling facilities, offering opportunity as demand grows quickly for food-grade recycled PP.
“The data captured demonstrates what is possible for the future of recycling and circular materials management, when powered by technology that can enhance transparency in the recycling system and increase high-quality material recovery,” said Kate Daly, managing partner and head of the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners.
She added: “As we continue our work with many of the world’s largest retailers and foodservice brands, we look forward to identifying more opportunities to pull valuable food-grade materials back into foodservice packaging supply chains––a critical step toward recycled content goals and packaging circularity.”
Consumers want greater transparency
Consumers are highly skeptical of recycling systems. Among the findings when The Recycling Partnership launched its Recycling Confidence Index in 2022 was that increased communication and transparency around recycling outcomes would improve trust.
Similarly, nonprofit GreenBlue said in 2025: “What do we owe consumers then? Convenient, clear and transparent information on what to do with the products or packaging they’ve purchased from us.”
And much of emerging extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation for packaging contains stipulations to ensure that collected plastics are processed as intended, and used in responsible end markets, or REMs.
Numerous options exist for providing independent verification, including digital product passports being introduced in the EU. And of course recyclers welcome the public to tour facilities and learn more about what they can do to help.
This month, KW Plastics was among numerous recyclers opening their doors for the second year of APR’s Recycling in Action campaign.
“The more people understand that recycling is not just an environmental effort but also a manufacturing and economic engine, the more confidence they have in the importance of participation,” said Stephanie Baker, director of advocacy and marketing at Alabama-based KW Plastics, following the Beyond Plastics report. “We can all either choose to place a plastic container in a trash can where it costs money to bury it in the ground, or we can choose a recycling bin and choose to reclaim value and support a supply chain while also conserving resources.”
Terminology can be confusing or misleading
A major sticking point for Beyond Plastics was the use of “widely recyclable” to describe the Starbucks PP cold cups. According to How2Recycle, the on-package labeling system administered by the GreenBlue nonprofit, “widely recyclable” means more than 60% of US households have access to curbside collection or drop-off programs for a material.
To be sure, the term “recyclable” does not offer a guarantee that packaging actually will be recycled. It’s merely a starting place for consumer behavior.
While Beyond Plastics also took issue with How2Recycle being industry-funded, and not subject to federal or state oversight, the group did not suggest any concrete solutions either during the press conference or in response to follow-up questions.
To help consumers better understand recycling and improve outcomes, WM, the nation’s largest recycler and waste hauler, offers the Recycle Right educational materials. “We try to keep it really simple. If it’s a bottle, can, cup, tub, paper or cardboard, put it in a recycling bin,” Ryan Nordt, executive director of recycling operations at WM, told Plastics Recycling Update following the Beyond Plastics report.
Even among stakeholders the terminology can be misunderstood. Another recycler called out in the report, PureCycle, uses a dissolution process to remove impurities from post-consumer PP, and along with other solvent-based recyclers globally continues to fight misperceptions.
The company said in a statement following the Beyond Plastics report: “PureCycle uses a plastics-to-plastics form of physical recycling known as dissolution to recycle polypropylene by separating color, odor and other impurities from recycled materials to transform it into our PureFive recycled resin. This is not a form of chemical recycling, pyrolysis, or solvolysis.” The company also explains the process in detail on its website.
Nevertheless, Beyond Plastics incorrectly classified the process first as chemical recycling in its report literature, and during the press conference as solvolysis, which is a type of solvent-based recycling that breaks chemical bonds in polymers such as PP, whereas PureCycle’s process does not involve chemical reactions or change the molecular structure.
These differences may seem esoteric, but failing to establish clear, unequivocal definitions of recycling processes has significant real-world consequences. Establishing mutually understood terminology helps inform public policy and educate laypeople including legislators and the general public.
During a recent interview with Plastics Recycling Update, PureCycle CEO Dustin Olson said since New Jersey’s recycled content mandate became law in 2022, new recycling technologies have developed and others have been refined. The 2022 law does not automatically qualify resin produced with “chemical recycling” processes, an umbrella under which it places all but mechanical methods. (During its press conference, Beyond Plastics indicated that mechanical recycling was the only process it considered legitimate.) The state considers non-mechanical methods on a case-by-case basis, and after extensive discussions with the state over an extended period of time, PureCycle resin recently qualified as postconsumer recycled content under the New Jersey law.
Reuse/refill is a strong option for reducing plastic usage
During its press conference, Beyond Plastics called for Starbucks to more consistently offer its reusable mugs and glasses for dine-in customers, noting that during most of the visits logged, the group’s volunteers were not offered a reusable option.
According to Starbucks, offering ceramic mugs and glasses is part of its Green Apron Service standard, a program the company launched in June 2025 to improve customer service and operational standards. The company said it trains staffers to ask customers if their beverage is “for here or to go,” and that it regularly reinforces this practice through training.
Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of reuse nonprofit Upstream, told Plastics Recycling Update, “Starbucks has always been about the experience. Imagine if that experience included knowing your cup was part of a system that actually worked — that it was coming back, getting washed, and going back out into the world. That’s a story customers want to be part of. The companies that will define the next decade aren’t the ones that recycled better — they’re the ones that stopped needing to.”
The company could reduce reliance on single-use cups by making reuse the default option for dine-in and take-out customers, Dreisbach said. She added that building interoperable systems among the company’s 17,000+ stores, as well as washing infrastructure, likely via third-party providers, could significantly advance the company beyond the mindset of reuse as merely a series of pilot projects.
She also said behavior change occurs with financial incentives higher than the current 10 cents Starbucks offers. For example, the company could implement a 50 cent to $1 surcharge on single-use cups to urge customers to change behavior.
Such a program could be rolled out in phases, for a more gradual approach, she said.
“They could use the ‘crawl, walk, run’ rollout, and then if they feel like operationally they can’t handle all of the washing and collection, there are turnkey services ready to take on contracts, to handle the collection, washing, redistribution, and relieve corporations like Starbucks of managing the logistics,” Dreisbach said.
And clear data derived from the company’s own participation in the three-month Petaluma reuse pilot in California, as well as analytics tools including Upstream’s Chart-ReUse, could help persuade the Starbucks C-suite that reuse is a financial and operational benefit, and not just a sustainability initiative.
“They can really be a leader in the coffee service industry,” Dreisbach said, adding that the real-world proof of reuse’s success, as well as store density and corporate policy are already in place. “What’s missing is the commitment to make reuse the default instead of the exception.”
In the future installment of this series, we’ll examine the Beyond Plastics study in more depth, and explore what questions its data raised.
