Where Do Plastic Bottles End Up?

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

There are three places where water bottles go most often when empty:

1. Recycled into another useful plastic product
2. Landfilled
3. Littered, adding to environmental debris

There are other possibilities, like reuse/refill with tap water and waste-to-energy recycling (municipal incinerators), but these are the small kids in the pool by a very large margin.

To complicate matters even more, we don’t have any reliable data except for production mass and recycling mass numbers. This makes it easy for groups to spin this their way in the press because the landfill/litter ratios are only estimates. For instance, if you contend that recycling is the only “proper” end, and state that 90 percent are “improperly disposed of,” that sort of looks like 90 percent ends up as litter, and that’s just not true.

Plastic bottle recycling is running at about 10-12 percent of manufacturing mass. That’s way below municipal recycling goals, and reflects a setback in goal attainment for recycling programs. Again, it is a ratio, and ratios involve two numbers. In this case they are total consumption, and total recycled.

Recycling volume can increase considerably while ratios still drop, as long as the consumption growth outruns it. If your doctor says you shouldn’t consume 10 percent of your body weight in junk food anymore, you can just put on a couple of hundred pounds, and then you get to increase consumption while still complying with the advice.

Conversely, an increase in water bottles sold from 3.3 billion in 1997 to 15 billion in 2002 makes it tough to reach percentage goals unless you are capable of ramping up your collection logistics pretty fast. We consume enough bottled water to fill every inch of office space in both towers of the (now non-existent) World Trade Center, from floor to ceiling, every 11 days.

I say collection because most processing facilities have enough slack to ramp up smoothly. Maybe you hire one more guy to operate the baler—no big deal. The facilities were designed to meet fairly lofty goals and, as long as it fits in the curbside bins, the trucks can handle it without much increase in routes.

I also say collection because our public spaces were not considered to be significant sources of recyclable plastic when the systems were designed, and guess where most bottled water is consumed—at the beach, the ballpark, the office, the car. . . You get my point; where’s the recycling bin?

There is some rich ground here in what is commonly called “closing the circle,” and I see two big links missing in this loop.

1. Recyclability—It will present a bit of a manufacturing design challenge, but reducing the diversity of the plastic resins in a single container could dramatically increase the ability to reuse the plastic. Your average water bottle contains the bottle itself, a cap made of PVC, the PVC ring leftover on the cap when the seal is broken and a shrink wrap or paper label. PVC contains chlorine, and chlorine and carbon in the same incinerator creates dioxins. Simply making the entire cap removable takes the PVC cap and the vinyl gasket out of the game, along with that little ring. If the bottles came with an organic label, like a soy-based ink imprint directly on the bottle, we’d be left with only one plastic resin.
2. Market development—The truth is that there is already a market for recycled plastic, but we can’t feed it as fast as we need to. We can make mixed-plastic lumber all day and never keep up with the growing demand for a lumber that doesn’t kill trees and lasts forever on your deck. Maybe we even market textiles that can be made into reusable grocery bags. Talk about closing the loop! Now we just fixed someone else’s image problem at the same time.

It really doesn’t matter if the perceived concern is landfill capacity assurance, park litter or wrack line debris at a public beach. We pay for bottled water because we want it and we are willing to pay someone to bottle it. Banning bottled water because we litter is like banning pets because people don’t pick up poop.