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.
- 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.
- 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.
jilllewiscomcastnet
posted on April 27th, 2008 at 6:30 am
I am looking for an article on the eco-wisdom of using single use water bottles in the first place. It seems to me that we should not buy these because their creation and transportation wastes energy. Why did buying bottled water become popular? Folks want to drink more water to be healthier and purchasing a bottle is convenient. If we made carrying a reusable water bottle more convenient, perhaps we could reduce the reliance on these water bottles. In addition, there is no analysis of the chemical content of bottled water, whereas tap water is tested frequently. Suggestions:
1) Add a “water bottle” faucet to drinking fountains to make water bottle refill faster and easier.
2) Design more (inexpensive) water bottle carriers, such as over the shoulder, or clip on, to make carrying a water bottle hassle free.
Bob Peeples, PE
posted on June 17th, 2008 at 11:36 am
jillewis,
You could start here: http://earth911.com/blog/2008/06/02/disposable-water-bottle-alternatives/
bp
cutie
posted on May 11th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
it helped me thanks but do u hve any pics of plastic bottles in landfill or in da ocean im doin a speech on why is tap water better than bottled water could u help me out?any info?any advice?
Suzi
posted on July 8th, 2009 at 3:57 am
Hey wait a minute Australia, WATER LIFE FORCE FOR THE HUMAN BODY
Short history lesson here I don’t have much space to account for years of stupidity but let’s see if I can give it ago.
I have never heard so much “crap and dribble in my life”. Sometimes I wonder what idiots are living here in Australia with the stupid garbage that some people latch onto without thought of an alternative plan in place. When I was growing up we had water tanks then some idiot with a half baked notion said “LETS GET RID OF WATER TANKS THEY ARE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH”. That’s right someone did some research, yes research don’t get me started on that!
I said at the time as a young girl of 16 years to my mother, “Who are these idiots telling us to get rid of the water tank we are going to need this water and what about our gardens”. We also used to use our washing water to feed our lawns, I think they now call this grey water. Does this sound familiar to anyone out there in Australia. Well we where told “DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT THAT BECAUSE WE HAVE PLENTY OF WATER”. The water board is taking care of that and you will have all the water you need it is called progress.
When I grew up playing netball and soccer it was common place to get a drink of water out of the bubbler or the tap. So when I took my children to netball or soccer the bubbler was gone but the tap was the only thing left. Then I noticed that the water bubblers and the taps in parks started to disappear or the taps were removed we were told that people don’t need them they can bring their own water.
Oh that was until the yuppie dog walker came along and started to complain in the last 8 to 10 years that they did not have taps for their precious dogs to drink from, Speers Point Park, Lake Macquarie has them strategically place through out the park for our precious dog to drink from and I think about two bubblers for the human population. So what do we see now humans and dogs drinking from the same taps if their bottle water runs out or they don’t have a bottle of water.
So why do we have bottle water in plastic in Australian because you cannot get a glass of water if you are just out doing your shopping IF YOU START TO FEEL DEHYDRATED YOU HAVE TO HAVE WATER. So bright sparks where do you plan the population to get water from in this very I don’t give a damn about you world that you have created because the shop keepers, café owners and restaurants are going to tell you to take a hike.
So having said all that can someone tell me what with all the obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc in our population from young to old that we have not targeted the carbonated drink industry that I think could be miles ahead in the pollution debate. Which reminds me I don’t think besides myself have I every see anyone reuse their carbonated plastic drink bottle over and over again like we do the plastic water bottle?
In the environmentally friendly days we used to have glass bottles and recycled them as kids and we where paid 5 cents to hand them back in, you know maybe we should do this again! Nothing like old is new to help the environment, but then again we cannot trust the population to not glass themselves.
Nothing like the good old days when you could get a glass of water, go for a walk in the park and drink out of a bubbler, and all the waste you create was put into one tiny garbage bin each week and we recycled everything.