Plastic Bottles

Plastic bottles and wide-mouth containers are constantly around us, from your bathroom cabinet to every fast food joint in town. They are also a valuable part of most U.S. communities’ recycling stream as PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) make up 96 percent of all plastic bottles produced in the U.S. The first PET bottle was recycled in 1977. Since then, plastic bottle recycling has increased to more than 2.4 billion pounds annually . Today, more than 80 percent of communities collect plastic bottles while nearly 30 percent of the 100 largest U.S. cities collected wide mouth plastic containers for recycling in 2007.