Ships in a bottle or bottles in the sand...

Let's go back a bit and talk about plastic bottles and water again. Beverage containers make up approx. 15% of all packaging waste in the U.S. Americans “throw away” about 200 billion, with a B, containers, including aluminum cans and plastic bottles every year.
As of the year 2000, according to the Container Recycling Institute, only 31% were recycled. CRI placed pressure on the large bottlers Pepsi and Coke to begin to use recycled content in their bottles. This action will not only reduce waste, but it would also take less energy and be better for the environment. If they were to make aluminum bottles from recycled aluminum it would require 95% less energy than producing one from the virgin material. In doing this, the beverage companies could save over 1.6 million barrels of crude oil to produce the plastic bottles. Pepsi announced a statement saying that they would use 10% recycled material for their bottles. Coke responded by stating that they were already doing so. However, they were also already using bottles in other countries with 25% recycled material.

Even with these recycling numbers it still means that two thirds of all bottles and cans go into the landfill. There are 11 states with bottle bills on their books. This means that there is a deposit for the consumer upon purchase of the beverage. These deposits are generally 5 -10 cents. States with plans with a ten cent deposit have seen as much as 97% return rates back to the stores for recycling. If you wish to help CRI with their efforts to persuade lawmakers to create more bottle bills you can contact them at CRI.

Much of this problem can be reduced on your part by not buying products like bottled water to begin with. As we stated previously finding a good water filter for you home or kitchen to purify your tap water can help reduce the debris of bottles that get thrown away every year. It takes 45 million gallons of oil to produce the bottled water that is sold in America every year.