There is work to do....
However, the sad truth is that less than 15% of plastics in North America actually get recycled – even if you lovingly put them in the blue bin like we do. In 2018, 35.5 million tons of plastic waste was generated in the U.S. with 26.9 million tons landfilled and only 3.1 million tons recycled. We dug into the EPA numbers a bit more and figured out that outside of beverage bottles, only about 8.19% of “non bottle” plastic packaging gets recycled annually in the US. That means almost all those clear food containers, clamshells and blister packs that you scrub clean and carefully place in your blue bin aren’t going anywhere fabulous.
We need to remember that recycling is a for-profit industry, and so recyclers tend to sort the most valuable after-market plastics (currently dominated by plastic PET #1 beverage bottles and HDPE #2 milk jugs) and toss the rest. For those that need the technical names PET is short for Polyethylene terephthalate and HDPE is the abreviated name for High-density polyethylene.
The latest Canadian Plastics Recycling report also concluded that PET #1 and HDPE #2 comprised the majority of post-consumer plastics recycling and that 89% of recycled PET was coming from beverage bottles.Ready to start ditching the fossil fuels? Chat with one of our plant-based specialists to learn more about how design, function AND ingredients can all help ramp up your positive environmental impact!
*Where such commercial composting facilities exist.