Before you go out for preemptively order your Wednesday morning coffee, you might want to make sure you take your to-go cup with you. Starbucks sells over 4 billion paper cups every year, and most of them will never be recycled.

In a recent statement Starbucks admitted to ways in which their 2008 goal of implementing front-of-store recycling at all of their company operated branches by 2015 has become a failure:

“Recycling seems like a simple, straightforward initiative – but it’s actually quite challenging,” wrote Starbucks execs in their recent Recycling & Reducing Waste statement. “Not only are there municipal barriers to successful recycling in many cities, but it takes significant changes in behavior to get it right.”

By 2013, only 39 percent of company-operated stores in the United States and Canada had front store recycling according to BloombergView. Out of the those stores, only 71 percent of cups were able to be recycled or composted. There is a 90 percent acceptance rate for cold cups to be recycled, but there has been a decline in the acceptance of hot cups due to limitations in recycling.

Here is a list as to why Starbucks isn’t recycling your cups:

1. Starbucks cups are lined with plastic to prevent leakage and that plastic needs to be removed before it can be turned into new paper. The technology exists to remove the lining but recyclers will only do it if they are supplied with enough used cups to justify using the process on a regular basis.

2. Starbucks is unable to produce enough cups to justify doing the recycling process. In 2010, Starbucks conducted a pilot program were three tons of cups from 170 Toronto stores was collected. But, according to BloombergView, that is only a tiny fraction of the 51.5 million tons of recyclable paper products collected in the United States during that year.

3. Composting isn’t a great option either. Although it removes the cups from landfills, composting generates green house gases and ruins the recycling value of the fibers within the cup.

4. Starbucks has had trouble getting its customers to start using personal re-usable cups. Even though the company made a plan of setting a 7 year goal of serving 25 percent of its beverages in re-usable cups by 2015, in 2011 only 1.9 percent of beverages were served in re-usable cups, according to BusinessInsider.

If people thought about how hard it is to recycle their paper to-go cups maybe they would put more thought into what they use to drink their coffee on a day-to-day basis.