There are upwards of 300 billion drinks bottles produced globally every year. At an average of 15g per bottle, that represents virgin plastic production of over 55,000 tons of PET. OK, I have taken a really conservative view of the number of bottles produced based on the few facts I could find, so the real situation is in fact far more severe.
Even Coca Cola has recently demonstrated that not disposing of all of this waste is no longer acceptable with their announcement to build a recycling facility to recycle all of their bottles. I have been thinking about this and have some ideas that could help. The big problem for the manufacturer is how to get their original bottles back? If they can do this, they will effectively have just loaned you the plastic and will get it back to recycle or reuse thus saving them the cost of buying new virgin plastic (a commodity that keeps going up with oil price hikes!) In the recycle process today, the bottles are collected and become raw material for another company in the plastics food chain to resell to Coca Cola! If we were to make the manufacturer responsible for the disposal of their containers, we would have a way of tying the costs associated with recycling back to the original manufacturer, or alternatively, they would have the opportunity to reuse and possibly save money on the cost of the containers. Economic incentives are always good to encourage action!
So how can we achieve this loop? There are a number of ideas, but the one I like the best is to use the existing infrastructure. That is, the postal services.
Imagine if every bottle had an address and pre-paid postage stamp of the company recycle point printed on it. All the consumer need do is collapse the bottle, screw the cap on and pop it in their mailbox.
Of course this could just as easily apply to household cleaners and other plastic packaging. Now we are talking hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic.
I like this idea because it ties the costs of disposable packaging directly back to the original manufacturer. In fact, if the containers are being returned to the manufacturer, there is little reason to recycle, probably most could be reused, which would represent a considerable saving in virgin materials as well as energy required to re/manufacture it.
I know it is a crazy idea, but the postal system would love it (increased volumes in empty returning residential postal delivery trucks), the environmentalists would love it (make the manufacturer responsible for their waste), potentially the manufacturers would love it (get their original material back) and I believe the consumer would like it (making the “polluter” responsible for disposing of their own waste problem).
There are more efficient ways of achieving this, I know, but this one provides for maximum options to recycle and I like that a lot!
