BOSTON – For the last five weeks, WBZ has been searching for plastic. This is part of a national project from CBS, investigating the recycling habits of Starbucks and just how environmentally friendly they are.
Each day, Starbucks sells 6 million cold cups of coffee. Over the course of a year, that’s 2.2 billion! That’s a whole lot of plastic.
In April 2024, Starbucks announced their “more sustainable” cold cups could keep more than 13 million pounds of plastic from landfills each year. While these cups may be designed to be recycled, CBS News found only one facility in the United States recycles these types of cups into new plastic items.
Tracking Starbucks cups with AirTags
To find out how true these recycling claims are, WBZ glued Apple AirTags inside a number of Starbucks cups so we could track where they ended up.
A total of seven AirTagged cups were thrown in the recycling bin inside stores across the area – Boston, Marlboro, Franklin, Cohasset, Foxboro, Plainville and Acton.