Comment by hamdingers
4 hours ago
> Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility.
This is an obvious methodology problem, no? Bluetooth-enabled trackers are not recyclable, so they ended up in the correct place.
These trackers probably had CR2032 batteries that could damage a shredder, would pollute the resulting pulp, and could easily be pulled out of the mixed recyclables stream by a magnet.
Whether or not the cup itself made it to a recycling facility is not something this experiment actually tested for. All they know is the tracker didn't make it. The system appears to be working as expected.
If you look at the raw data they provided, more than half of them just stop transmitting while on the highway.
Some they can arguably prove were probably on the way to a landfill. But "none pinged from a recycling facility" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.
Yet it still seems like decent evidence that the consumer-facing story is much simpler than the actual recycling path