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Why the U.S. is Falling Behind in Recycling Plastic Bottles
U.S. consumers are recycling a smaller percentage of plastic bottles than they did a decade ago, despite mounting public concern about the environment. Salon columnist Andrew Leonard investigates the apparent dichotomy and identifies some causes and a remedy or two.
In 2005, 23% of plastic bottles sold in the U.S. were recycled, down from 40% a decade earlier. What makes this drop-off especially startling, Mr. Leonard says, is that the demand for the petroleum byproduct that the bottles are made of keeps rising. Manufacturers in China are eager to lay their hands on ground-up polyethylene terephthalate, a.k.a PET, which they turn into synthetics such as polyester.
So what is holding back recycling in the U.S.? It turns out that the U.S. recycled nearly the same amount of PET bottles in 2005 as it did in 1995, when the total stood at 775 million pounds. But during the past decade or so, the number of bottles produced more than doubled, to nearly five billion pounds, while recycling amounts held steady. That is partly because there isn’t sufficient capacity in the U.S. to handle the recycling – cleaning out the gunk left from soda and juice, and chopping up the bottles into flakes. Another problem is that voluntary recycling programs aren’t very effective – many people in the U.S. don’t realize that plastic bottles can be recycled.
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