Tracking where Starbucks single-use cups actually end up when recycled | KCAL Investigates

Starbucks is one of the United States' biggest users of single-use plastic cups, and despite company requests for customers to place their expended cups in their recycle bins, CBS News has discovered that rarely happens. 

Those cups make up part of the 97 billion pounds of plastic waste generated by Americans every year, a major contributing factor behind two Orange County women and their goal to find out where the cups actually end up. 

Susan Keefe and her partner rise early, beating the baristas to their first pours as they wait for trash trucks to pick up from local Starbucks locations. 

She says that she felt like it was necessary to get involved in what she believes is a personal matter. 

"I needed data, I needed proof," says the former high-tech executive. 

Keefe has been collecting the plastic cups that Starbucks uses for their iced drinks, which account for about 75% of their sales, for months. After placing the trackers into the bottom of the cups, she drops them right back into the world-famous coffee shop's recycling bins. 

From there, she tracks their journey by phone, following those trucks to wherever they drop their load at. She's lost some trackers and even lost some trucks she was following during her lengthy investigation, but in the end, she says she found out exactly where the recyclables were actually winding up. 

In most instances, she followed trucks to an Orange County landfill, which is the opposite of ideal. 

"This is the last place," she said when asked where she would want that plastic to end up. 

Are customers being lied to? 

Jan Dell is a retired chemical engineer who says almost no corporation actually recycles the type of plastic typically used in single-use products like Starbucks.  

"They're being fooled ... they're being lied to," Dell said of customers who believe they're doing the right thing by recycling their cups after use. "Flat out lied to. These are not recyclable, there are not factories that want these."

Dell says that the particular type of plastic cannot be ground up and turned back into a cup, because it becomes "toxic and grey and stinky."

Five months ago, she came up with the idea to dive into dumpsters and find out where the cups were ending up. 

"If I don't do it, no one's going to do it," Dell said. "Just flat out lying ... And it's provable, right?"

Dell and Keefe tracked 12 recycled cups, following them to landfills in four different states. 

When conducting an experiment to see what their theory may prove, KCAL News' Ross Palombo similarly dropped a cup with a tracker at an East Los Angeles Starbucks location. 

It was tracked for one and a half miles to a waste transfer center, which Dell says is just another stop on the way to a landfill. 

A different cup drop in Hollywood revealed much of the same, following the GPS-rigged item for 13 miles to a waste transfer center in Sun Valley that also works as a materials recovery facility. 

Palombo dropped a third cup in Beverly Hills, which ended up 18 miles away, again at Athens Services, a Sun Valley materials recovery facility. 

When speaking with an employee at the facility, Palombo found that they recover the plastic items and ship them out, instead of melting them down. 

Dell says it's very unlikely that the product could have been recycled there. 

"There's no factories that wanna buy it," she said. 

Tracking cups across the nation

CBS News investigative teams across the nation dropped cups into 57 labeled Starbucks recycling bins in 18 cities nationwide.

They were able to find possible locations for 36 of those drops, only four of which were pinged at locations that appeared to be recovery facilities.

Thirteen wound up at waste transfer stations, five at incineration locations and 14 at places that appeared to be landfills. 

"That is unacceptable," said Starbucks executive Amelia Landers. "It's disappointing."

Still, officials insist that their cups can actually be recycled. They say that mixed material or possible contamination, which is a system outside of their control, are possible explanations as to why they don't end up where they should.

"There are a number of things that get in the way of making sure that a recyclable cup ends up where it's intended," Landers said. "Once it leaves our stores, there is a landlord, a building owner, other tenants in the building. There is an infrastructure that takes that away and that is largely outside of Starbucks."

CBS News similarly tracked a plastic cup recycled at an Erewhon location. It was last pinged near a landfill in Rialto. Plastic bags were dropped at a Home Depot, all of which wound up at an Antelope Valley landfill. 

Dell is unsurprised by the revelation. 

"The vast majority of plastics are not recyclable," she said, claiming that only 5% of plastics in the United States actually get properly recycled. 

She says that single-use plastics are the most wasteful item. 

"They are one of many, but they are at the top of the pyramid," Dell said. "They are proactively promoting a lie in their stores. ... It is their product, their bin, in their store. That is a claim, a legal claim to the public, that that thing should be recycled."

When asked if they're breaking California state law?

"I believe they are," she said. 

Starbucks denies that. 

"To the extent that we can influence and help guarantee that those cups end up where they're intended, we're attempt to do. But, it's shared accountability," Landers says. 

None of those answers are stopping Dell from continuing her work. 

"My goal, number one goal, is to get companies to stop lying about plastics," she said. "And empty those shelves."

She and Keefe say all their work is exactly what it takes to reveal the truth.

"I think, unfortunately, this is what it takes to prove a massive company the size of Starbucks is deceiving their customers," Keefe says. 

The investigation continues

Although plastic cups were traced in nearly 20 cities in the U.S., Starbucks is a global company and the CBS News investigation represents just a fraction of the stores. The investigation's results are not indicative of the entire chain. 

Home Depot says that all plastic bags are recyclable and that the GPS tracker may have been sorted out by employees who threw it away in a separate receptacle. 

Erewhon says that their cups are also sorted as thoroughly as possible, also maintaining that their material is recyclable. 

Athens, the facilities where some of the cups wound up, says that the product is recyclable but declined to tell KCAL News exactly where that happens or what company does the recycling. 

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery does not have a list of companies that recycles the single-use plastic Starbucks uses. 

As for the recyclables — a plastic bottle and an aluminum ca — that Palombo deposited in bins at the CBS Broadcast Center in Studio City, the bottle wound up at a recycling center in South Los Angeles while the can was last pinged two weeks ago in the same location, meaning it may have been crushed in the recycling process.