Is Starbucks Sustainable or is it Greenwashing?
Welcome to my "Sustainable or Greenwashing" series where I'm sharing if brands and products are actually what they say they are.
Is Starbucks sustainable or is it greenwashing? ☕
Starbucks is the coffee shop on every corner — and in 2020 it made a big promise about the cup in your hand. By 2030, it said, 100% of its customer packaging would be reusable, recyclable, or compostable. Then in early 2026, it started calling its plastic cold cups "widely recyclable," saying more than 60% of US households can recycle them curbside. That is a very specific claim. So a nonprofit decided to test it — by following the cups.
Beyond Plastics, a Vermont-based nonprofit, spent three months in early 2026 putting Bluetooth trackers inside Starbucks' single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropping them into the recycling bins inside Starbucks stores. They placed 53 trackers at 35 stores across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 that sent back usable data, not one — zero — ended up at a recycling facility. Sixteen went to landfills. Nine went to incinerators. Eight stopped at waste-transfer stations, which is a stop on the way to a landfill. Three made it to materials recovery facilities, which sort plastics but do not recycle them.
And it was not a one-off. A follow-up spot check in July and August 2026, months after Starbucks had been told the results, found the same thing. In total, 69 trackers were deployed and 47 sent back data. Zero cups were confirmed recycled. Twenty-three ended in landfills, eleven at incinerators, ten at transfer stations, three at sorting facilities.
Within hours of the first report going public in May 2026, Starbucks deleted the web page where it had explained why its cups were recyclable. That page now returns a 404.
Here is why the cups do not get recycled, even when you put them in the right bin. Only two facilities in the entire United States can recycle polypropylene, and together they can handle about 2% of all the polypropylene waste the country produces. An independent engineer's analysis put real municipal access at 6% of the US population — not 60%. A 2025 Greenpeace analysis found US facilities can reprocess only 5% of polypropylene cups. And the FTC's Green Guides — the federal rules for environmental claims — say it is misleading to call something recyclable unless 60% of consumers actually have access to a program that will recycle it. Not a program that accepts it and throws it away. A program that recycles it.
Starbucks pushed back on the investigation, saying tracker studies "do not reflect how recycling systems operate in practice" and that its cups carry a "widely accepted for recycling" designation from How2Recycle. That is the distinction at the heart of this whole post: accepted for recycling is not the same thing as recycled.
The scale makes it worse. Nearly all of Starbucks' 17,000+ US locations still use plastic cups and packaging. About 580 stores have switched to paper cups — the exception, not the rule.
This is not the first time the cup story has gone sideways, either. Back in 2018, Starbucks banned plastic straws and replaced them with strawless lids — and the new lids used more plastic than the old lid and straw combined. The company said the lids were a different, recyclable plastic. The problem is the same one as the cups: only about 9% of the world's plastic is actually recycled.
To be fair, I will give them this: the coffee side of the business has more substance than the cup side. Starbucks' own sourcing standard, C.A.F.E. Practices, has been around since 2004, and the company says more than 99% of its coffee now comes from verified supply chains covering nearly 400,000 farms, with a zero-tolerance rule for forced and child labor. That is a real program with real scale.
But the standard is Starbucks' own — it is not an independent certification — and the record shows the gaps. In November 2023, Repórter Brasil found cases of slave and child labor on Brazilian coffee farms holding C.A.F.E. Practices certification. In 2025, a federal lawsuit accused Starbucks of sourcing from a Brazilian supplier, Cooxupé, despite documented forced labor on its plantations. And a December 2024 investigation by China Labor Watch and Coffee Watch found child labor, low wages, excessive hours, and no protective gear in Starbucks' Chinese coffee supply chain. A standard that certifies farms where those things are happening is a standard with a verification problem.
So is Starbucks sustainable or is it greenwashing?
I'm going to say greenwashing — and I want to be clear about why, because the coffee side of this company is real. C.A.F.E. Practices has been around since 2004, more than 99% of the coffee comes from verified supply chains covering nearly 400,000 farms, and the company publishes its sourcing numbers. That is a real program with real scale, and it stays in this post because it is true.
But the cup — the thing you actually hold in your hand, billions of times a year — is a different story. Starbucks called its plastic cold cups "widely recyclable." A nonprofit put trackers in 69 of them. Zero were confirmed recycled. Sixteen went to landfills and nine to incinerators in the first round alone — and months later, after Starbucks had been told the results, the follow-up found the same thing. Within hours of the first report going public, Starbucks deleted the web page explaining why its cups were recyclable.
"Widely recyclable" turns out to mean "accepted by a bin," not "recycled." Only two facilities in the entire United States can recycle polypropylene, and together they can handle about 2% of all the polypropylene waste the country produces. And the 2026 tracker evidence is newer than my original research on this brand — it is the newest information in this post, and it is what tips the call.
So it is greenwashing — not because nothing Starbucks does is good, but because the claim on the cup you hold every day does not survive being tested. The coffee program is real. The cup claim is not. And in this series, the claim on the thing you actually use is the one that counts.
If you love your Starbucks run, the most sustainable version of that habit is the one they already offer — bring your own cup, or drink it in the store in a real mug. And if you want to see what a food-and-drink brand looks like when the claims hold up, my Oat Milk and Liquid Death breakdowns are on the hub. What do you think — is Starbucks sustainable, or is it greenwashing? Let me know, and if there is another brand you want me to cover, send it my way!
I have many more deep dives on the Sustainable or Greenwashing hub — stick around for all things mind, body, and planet! 🌎
XOXO,
Krys
