This is why you can't recycle your coffee cup

The City of Toronto is asking residents not to recycle coffee cups (Pexels).

Tossing a coffee cup in a recycling bin may be well-intentioned, but the City of Toronto is reminding residents to refrain from it.

That’s because coffee cups are not recyclable in Toronto – but why?

There’s a few reasons, according to the city. First, black coffee lids camouflages with the black conveyer belt at the recycling facility in Toronto.

“The lack of colour contrast prohibits the optical sorting tech from seeing the black lid,” Magdalena Stec, Toronto’s strategic public and employee communications advisor, told CTV News Toronto on Friday.

There are 30 mills across North America that recycle paper cups, which are then used to make tissue and paperboard. The Toronto facility is not one of them.

“But infrastructure is expanding, and the industry is innovating new technologies and working with municipalities to collect even more,” the American Forest and Paper Association says on its website.

Toronto’s recycling campus has fully-automated high-speed sorting robots and other mechanical separation processes, Green For Life (GFL) details on its website.

“Another issue with coffee cups is they cannot be sorted automatically at the recycling facility and would need to be hand sorted, which is very costly,” another city employee, Nadine Kerr, explained in an instructional video.

While a coffee cup looks like it is made of paper, it actually has a plastic liner, Kerr said, which is hard to separate from the paper, making it difficult to recycle. There are also dyes on the paper cups, which can’t be recycled, she added.

“As a result, there is currently no stable longterm market for coffee cups. For something to be recycled, you need to have a market that’s willing to buy it to make it into something new,” Kerr said.

That being said, the city is asking residents to remove non-black plastic lids and paper sleeves from their counterparts to recycle in the Blue Bin.