Plastic Waste Hits an All Time High:
Only One Out of Five Bottles Recycled

Container and Packaging Recycling UPDATE v.12, n.2, Fall/Winter02

A report from the American Plastics Council (APC) shows that plastic bottle waste hit an all time high last year, with nearly 6 billion pounds ending up in landfills, incinerators or littered. Of the 5.78 billion pounds of plastic bottles trashed in 2001, CRI estimates that about one-half were beverage bottles. In terms of the percent of bottles recycled, both PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) bottles showed negligible in creases over 2000 rates.

Plastic Bottle Recycling Comparison
Source: American Plastics Council Container Recycling Institute, Dec. 2002

"While it is useful to compare consecutive years," said Pat Franklin, CRI's executive director, "looking back over the past decade offers a better perspective on long-term trends. For example, the PET recycling rate in 2002 (22.1%) was 2.5 percentage points lower than the 1991 rate, but it was 15 percentage points lower than the 1994 rate-the peak year for plastic bottle recycling." According to CRI, the PET soft drink bottle recycling rate in 2001 was exactly the same as the 1991 rate-35.1%--but far below the all-time high of 52.8% in 1994.

A comparison of PET and HDPE recycling over the past decade (fig. 1) shows that the HDPE recycling rate more than doubled while the PET recycling rate dropped 3 percentage points. PET recycling has not kept pace with the tremendous growth in sales, which grew more than 200% from 1991 to 2001. The number of pounds of PET wasted also grew from about 900 million pounds in 1991 to more than 2,900 million pounds last year. HDPE bottle waste has grown at a far slower pace.

In a recent Plastics News article, Pete Dinger, APC technology director, said that getting enough material from community recycling programs continues to be a challenge. He was quoted in the article as saying, "... something has to happen to stimulate the consumer to recycle more." In the same article, Franklin faulted the APC report for not mentioning what she said is a major driver of recycling - container deposit laws. APC opposes them, but Franklin said deposit systems have a recycling rate three to four times that of the national average. "Nothing stimulates the consumer like a refundable deposit," said Franklin.