Although it’s commonly thought that it’s too difficult or expensive to remove the plastic lining to recycle old coffee cups or that coffee contamination is too problematic, Starbucks has proven it could be done.
This year, Starbucks sent 25 million old paper coffee cups to a paper mill in Wisconsin, where they were processed into recycled fiber and sent to another company to be made into paperboard for new cups. This was a pilot project Starbucks conducted to prove that old, used coffee cups could indeed be recycled into new cups.
