Electronic Bluetooth Trackers Placed in Starbucks’ In-Store Recycling Bins Followed the Polypropylene Cups to Landfills and Incinerators

For Immediate Release: May 20, 2026

Contacts:

• Melissa Valliant, Beyond Plastics — melissavalliant@bennington.edu, (410) 829-0726

• Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics — judithenck@bennington.edu, (518) 605-1770

A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores. As detailed in the new report, titled “Tracking Starbucks’ Deceptive Recyclability Claims,” the findings directly contradict Starbucks’ recent public claims that its single-use polypropylene (No. 5 plastic) cold cups are “widely recyclable.”

"Starbucks is telling its customers that these plastic cups get recycled, but our trackers tell a different story — they're ending up in landfills and incinerators and not being recycled," said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator. "Accepting a plastic item for recycling is not the same as actually recycling it, and the company knows the difference. It's time for Starbucks to stop making misleading recycling claims and start prioritizing plastic-free, preferably reusable, alternatives for its customers."

Between January and March 2026, Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility. Instead, the cups traveled to landfills, incinerators, waste-transfer stations, and material recovery facilities.

“We tracked Starbucks’ plastic cups using Starbucks’ own in-store recycling bins, and not a single one ended up at a recycling facility," said Susan Keefe, Beyond Plastics' Southern California director. "This is the world's largest coffee chain, and about 75% of its U.S. beverage sales are cold drinks, mostly served in plastic cups. That's a massive amount of plastic waste. Contrary to what it touts, Starbucks is not “giving cups a second life” and can't recycle its way out of its plastic problem. It needs to stop deceiving its customers into thinking it can."

Key Findings:

Of the 36 trackers that successfully moved from the store and reached a final destination:

• 0 pinged from an actual recycling facility

• 16 ended up in landfills

• 9 ended up at incinerator facilities

• 8 were last detected at waste-transfer stations — a stop on the way to a landfill or incinerator

• 3 reached materials recovery facilities (MRFs), which sort and bale plastic but do not themselves recycle it — a stop at an MRF does not mean a cup was recycled

The tracked cups collectively traveled thousands of miles. Four cups crossed state lines from New York City to a landfill in Amsterdam, Ohio — the longest single trip was 463 miles, beginning at a Starbucks at 225 4th Avenue in Brooklyn to the Ohio landfill.

View the full report here. View the full data set here.

A Second Finding: Many Starbucks Stores Offered No Recycling at All

Beyond Plastics initially focused on 21 states for the investigation but was able to deploy trackers in only 10 of them. The stores surveyed in the other 11 states did not offer recycling at all or had specific signage showing that Starbucks’ plastic and paper cups are collected for landfill only. This is notable given that Starbucks is publicly promoting its polypropylene cold cups as “widely recyclable” nationwide.

Why This Matters

On February 2, 2026, Starbucks announced — alongside WM (formerly Waste Management) and three recycling groups — that polypropylene was now considered “widely recyclable” in the United States, a designation issued by the labeling program How2Recycle that is not vetted by state or federal regulators. Starbucks said the change meant more than 60% of U.S. households could recycle its cold cups curbside.

But access to a recycling program is not the same as a cup actually being recycled. The U.S. recycling rate for plastics is under 6%, and most of that is No. 1 (PET) and No. 2 (HDPE) bottles and jugs — not polypropylene. 

What’s more, polypropylene has very few places to go for recycling in the United States. The exact number of polypropylene recycling facilities nationwide is difficult to determine without publicly available and up-to-date databases. A December 2025 Greenpeace report identified two commercially operating facilities in the entire country that claim to recycle post-consumer polypropylene: KW Plastics in Troy, Alabama, and St. Joseph Plastics in Saint Joseph, Missouri. An Ultra-Poly recycling facility in Portland, Pennsylvania, claims to recycle polypropylene, and Republic Services Blue Polymers facilities in Indianapolis and Las Vegas claim to recycle post-consumer polypropylene plastic.  

PureCycle's Ironton, Ohio, plant claims to recycle polypropylene through so-called "chemical recycling,” but Beyond Plastics does not consider chemical recycling to be recycling given that most of the plastic these facilities accept is not actually recycled but turned into fossil fuels or feedstocks using high heat or chemicals. It's a distraction that has failed for decades and is allowing companies to exponentially increase plastic production while polluting low-income communities and communities of color with hazardous waste and toxic air pollution.

Given the low value of used polypropylene, the cost of shipping it long distances, and high contamination from liquids and food residue, it is unlikely that cups collected nationwide are reaching recycling plants. In California, polypropylene bales have an average contamination rate of 31% — far above the 2% that KW Plastics accepts.

Starbucks is the world’s largest coffee chain, with more than 40,000 stores worldwide. About 75% of its U.S. beverage sales are cold drinks, most often served in polypropylene cups. In 2020, Starbucks committed to making 100% of its customer packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2030; nearly all of its 17,000-plus U.S. stores still use plastic cups and packaging.

To view the report, tracking data, and an interactive map of the Starbucks cups’ journeys, please visit: https://www.beyondplastics.org/starbucks-cups 

To watch the recorded news conference, please visit:
https://www.youtube.com/@beyondplastics/videos 

About Beyond Plastics

Launched in 2019, Beyond Plastics pairs the wisdom and experience of environmental policy experts with the energy and creativity of grassroots advocates to build a vibrant and effective movement to end plastic pollution. Using deep policy and advocacy expertise, Beyond Plastics is building a well-informed, effective movement seeking to achieve the institutional, economic, and societal changes needed to save our planet and ourselves, from the negative health, climate, and environmental impacts for the production, usage, and disposal of plastics.

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