I don’t know the answer to your question directly. Much of municipal recycling is exactly as you suspect: it either gets into the municipal waste stream in another way (but everyone who put out the appropriate bag and box feels good about themselves) or is sold off as raw materials to some overseas factory which will recycle it into more trash we don’t need (and we get to pay some big box store for the privilege, too).

I do know that several years ago the City of Toronto incinerator worked overtime processing “recycling” while the garbage was trucked to Michigan. In their case, there was no market for the outputs from recycling, and it just kept piling up… I’ve heard similar stories from San Francisco.

For what it is worth, since evidently the City of Vancouver does accept Starbucks (et. al.) cups in the yellow bag stream, we do wash ours out, flatten them and put them with all the other paper products (non-newsprint). Lids we dump in the trash, as the blue box gang simply won’t take them. (Nor will they take the lids from tubs, e.g. margarine, yoghourt, etc., even though the lids are one of the four approved types of plastic as are the tubs themselves. And our delightful civic workers toss the lids all over the lane behind my garage – littering! – in the process. It’s enough to make want to simply fill the trash pail and be done with it, except that’ll get you fines galore for “failing to do your civic duty”. These days I am really longing for life in Connecticut, where the town didn’t pick up the trash [hire a private contractor to do it] and in return it could all just go to the dump without further incident. Alas, those days are gone.)

Annoying, isn’t it, that you can’t easily find out whether the unpaid labour that goes into all this separating, washing, flattening, etc., actually achieves anything?

We wash the paper Starbucks cups, flatten them, and put them in the yellow recycling bag, where they are accepted (other than for the past eight weeks, as Sam’s Strike grinds ever onward). They get reduced, repulped, and new paper products made from them.

Plastics (like the iced coffee one), on the other hand, even though we can put them out in the blue box as well, are often difficult to recycle, mostly because there isn’t much of a market for the stuff.

We do, as a society, run through an awful lot of both paper and plastic at our coffee houses. (Well, and other places, too!) It would be better to always have a refillable, reusable, “real” cup with you. Not that that is easy to do, especially when taking the bus into the city and going on foot from meeting to meeting, with stops (for WiFi & sustenance) in between. At least most of the places I patronize do have a proper china mug for my coffee – although now we’re into the environmental costs of dishwashers, superheated water (required to avoid bacteriological infections in restuarants), chemical cleaners (required by the design of dishwashers) … egad, I think I need a coffee just to try and figure out what the least damaging course of action might be!

In many ways the blue and yellow bags, and the blue box, have made us complacent which is a point worthy of the price of admission to Coffee Offline.