April 27, 2009
Opinion
Glass half empty for container recycling
By Pat Franklin
When it comes to beverage container recycling, I´m often accused of looking at the glass half empty. That´s because the glass is half empty, and has been for 16 years.
The recycling rate for beverage containers has fallen steadily, since hitting an all-time high of 54% in 1992. Sixteen years ago bottled water in single-serve plastic bottles was just a dream in someone´s head. Today it´s the fastest growing beverage on the market.
That´s good news for the bottled water producers. The bad news is that the recycling rate for plastic water bottles is deplorable.
The bottled water industry, especially Nestle Waters, gets high marks for their source reduction efforts (increasing the bottles per pound from 12 to 13.8), but deserves an F in recycling and an F for misleading the public.
Based on a NAPCOR report for the International Bottled Water Association titled "2007 Report on PET Water Bottle Recycling," IBWA is claiming that the recycling rate for water bottles is 23.4%, even though the report clearly states on Page 1 that "All of these data sources in and of themselves are not sufficient to ´numerically´ calculate the actual collection and recycling rates for PET water bottles."
I say the rate is closer to 18%, but hey, even at 23.4% that´s fewer than one in four bottles recycled; and Americans buy a lot of water bottles.
We´re only four months into 2009 and we´ve already drained about 16 billion PET water bottles -- a billion a week. By year´s end that number will likely rise to more than 50 billion bottles, with a price tag in excess of $15 billion. And that´s just the cost to consumers. The costs to the environment and society of those wasted bottles are significant.
Who knows what the dollar cost will be of burying or burning the estimated 40 billion plastic water bottles that won´t be recycled this year.
And then there´s the cost of dealing with the hundreds of millions of bottles that will fill our streams and rivers and despoil our roadsides and beaches before the year is over.
It´s impossible to put a dollar amount on the environmental costs of plastic water bottle waste, but let´s look at the energy and greenhouse gas emissions resulting from replacing the estimated 40 billion plastic water bottles that will be trashed this year with new bottles made from virgin materials.
Replacement production will consume the energy equivalent of 46 trillion BTUs -- enough to meet the total residential energy needs of 400,000 American homes. GHG emissions will be equivalent to the emissions generated by a quarter of a million cars in one year.
It all adds up to a solid waste of energy and nonrenewable resources.
It´s not a pretty picture, but there is some good news. Last year Oregon updated its law to include bottled water and this year New York and Connecticut added bottled water to their laws.
Six states now require refundable deposits on bottled water. It won´t move the bar as much as we´d all like to see it moved, but taking 3 or 5 billion plastic bottles out of the waste stream and putting them into the recycling stream is something to cheer about.
When the PET recycling rate goes up in 2009, we´ll have updated bottle bills to thank.
Franklin founded the Container Recycling Institute in 1991 and retired as its executive director in 2007.
http://www.wasterecyclingnews.com/opinion2.html?cat=3&id=1240840643&allowcomm=true