Starbucks To Recycle Coffee Grounds and Food Waste into Bio-Plastics in Hong Kong

[Emit]

Starbucks To Recycle Coffee Grounds and Food Waste into Bio-Plastics in Hong Kong

Read more: Starbucks To Recycle Coffee Grounds and Food Waste Into Bio-Plastics in Hong Kong | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

Over the past year, Starbucks has launched a range of initiatives to reduce their footprint, and now in order to tackle their share of the 1.3 billion tons of food that is put into landfills worldwide each year, the coffee giant is working with biorefinery scientists to transform food waste from their stores into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents and a host of other everyday products.

Starbucks made the announcement about their new sustainability project at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. The chain hopes to be able to use the tonnes of spent coffee grounds and stale bakery goods that might otherwise be wasted and turn them into useful products.

“Our new process addresses the food waste problem by turning Starbucks’ trash into treasure — detergent ingredients and bio-plastics that can be incorporated into other useful products,” said Carol S. K. Lin, Ph.D., who led the biorefinery research team. “The strategy reduces the environmental burden of food waste, produces a potential income from this waste and is a sustainable solution.”

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http://inhabitat.com/starbucks-to-recycle-coffee-grounds-and-food-waste-into-bio-plastics-in-hong-kong/

[KurtNYC]

1. Starbucks has been singing this tune for years

2.3 billion cups per year -- all lined with plastic.

The most efficient part of "Reduce Re-use Recycle" is reduce. Seems like using in-house mugs would be more environmentally friendly than just continuing to grind out cups. In the US there is only one facility which can recycle their cups and the odds that they are shipping 2.3 billion cups to Mississippi seem low

A follow-on update from Fast Company, Can Starbucks Really Recycle Its Cups?, from November, 2010, reports that at that time only one pulp mill in the country, in Mississippi, had the capacity to recycle used Starbucks cups into new cups, because the cups are constructed of paper with a plastic liner, which isn’t recyclable in most markets. So if the majority of the contents of the colored recycling bags from inside each store are going to municipal recycling facilities, they are probably getting pulled off the line and diverted into the landfill anyway.

http://www.karmicrecycling.com/2012/01/20/starbucks-recyling-greenwashing-or-the-real-deal/

[kestrel91316]

2. They need to be doing the recycling HERE IN THE US. And they

need to complete the circle by using those same recycled plastics in their stores.

[aiannas]

3. Spam deleted by Behind the Aegis (MIR Team)