Needless to say at Park&Co we are always looking at different ways to be sustainable both socially and environmentally. So of course, we recycle. Easy right ? You’d think, but it was brought to our attention that many of us were recycling things that we thought were recyclable but were not - it’s not like we were recycling styrofoam, I’m talking about the different papers and plastics that can be assumed to be recyclable, but aren’t. I’ll admit I was guilty of assuming that if it is paper, plastic or glass it is recyclable. Long story short, I learned Starbucks cups are NOT recyclable!

How could this be? A non recyclable paper cup. I couldn’t believe it so I did a little more digging. I visited Starbucks Shared Planet website and found out that they won’t have a recyclable cup until 2015.Peets Coffee implemented a recyclable cup in 2007. This is amazing to me that the r&d has already been done by other companies, and a giant like Starbucks can’t get this up and running for another 6 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy Starbucks and think highly of them as a company.  They pay their employees very well, are known for providing very good low cost health insurance, even for part time employees, and pledge to buy their coffee from Ethical Sources (i.e. not giant coffee farms that elbow out local farmers who grow the highest quality beans).

In the end I am disappointed that  Starbucks won’t take the extra steps to deliver us a recyclable cup, and annoyed that the only thing that I can put in the recycling bin is the cap to my coffee cup. The cardboard sleeve is not even recyclable.

So what can we do? We can join the campaign and request that Starbucks steps up their effort by clicking here. I did, it was simple and only took a minute. You can also post the widget below on your blog or website, I also did this for my personal blog.

Take a second and join the campaign.  After all, we aren’t asking for Starbucks to change the world, we just want to be able to toss the cup into the recycling bin and feel good about not trashing the environment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 12:52 pm by Shawn Hardy and is filed under | Combustible Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.