Why, when Americans are throwing away 22 billion plastic water bottles a year, are there not enough scrap bottles for plastics recyclers? Exports aside, there were more than million pounds million kg of domestic scrap PET bottles that could have been recycled, but were not. The broken link between postconsumer PET bottles and plastics processors is the lack of an adequate collection infrastructure.
First, nearly one-half of the US population does not have access tokerbside recycling and probably never will. These include individuals and families who live in very rural areas or in high-rise apartment buildings.
But even if every family in America had access to kerbside recycling, water bottles are much more likely to be consumed in hotels, offices, schools, and during sporting events and outdoor activities than most beverages, and would not likely make it into the kerbside recycling bin. Recycling in commercial buildings is scarce, and recycling at sports, entertainment venues, parks and beach areas has proven extremely challenging.
Consumers need to appreciate the fact that their municipal water is not only safe to drink, but it may even be safer than bottled water. They also need to appreciate the multiplicity of environmental problems created by their consumption of bottled water. But even if consumption were to be reduced dramatically, there would still be billions of post-consumerplastic water bottles that would need to be managed.
Financial incentives, in the form of refundable deposits, provide a collection infrastructure that works both at home and away from home. In South America and Europe, many beverage companies, including global beverage giant Coca-Cola, still offer their products in refillable bottles.
Most have switched from glass to PET plastic refillables to reduce transportation costs. In the US, beer and soft drinks were packaged exclusively in refillable glass bottles until one-way bottles and cans were introduced in the s and s.
Today, refillable bottles are just a memory for older American consumers. Younger consumers have no memory of refillables at all. Plastic trash has become so ubiquitous it has prompted efforts to write a global treaty negotiated by the United Nations. Plastics made from fossil fuels are just over a century old. Production and development of thousands of new plastic products accelerated after World War II, so transforming the modern age that life without plastics would be unrecognizable today. Plastics revolutionized medicine with life-saving devices, made space travel possible, lightened cars and jets—saving fuel and pollution—and saved lives with helmets, incubators, and equipment for clean drinking water.
Many of these products, such as plastic bags and food wrappers, have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years.
A whale shark swims beside a plastic bag in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen. Although whale sharks are the biggest fish in the sea, they're still threatened by ingesting small bits of plastic.
Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers , which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream. Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre, a circular ocean current. Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than one-fifth of an inch across.
These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench , the deepest trough. Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers, meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air.
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Some plastics we can reuse or recycle—and many play important roles in areas like medicine and public safety—but other items, such as straws, are designed for only one use.
In fact, more than 40 percent of plastic is used only once before it is thrown away, where it lingers in the environment for a long, long time.
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