Bottled Up

Ever wonder where that plastic bottle you tossed in the recycling bin ends up?

It’s hard to imagine just how significantly we rely on plastic, a catch-all term for a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic materials derived from organic products. To give you an idea, it’s estimated that global plastic consumption has risen from 5.5 million tons in the 1950s to nearly 300 million tons per day.

Plastic’s ubiquitousness is especially visible on every street corner of America, where single-use bottles overflow from recycling bins. Imagine this: Americans go through about 2.5 million plastic bottles each hour. But after the refreshment is gulped and the container is tossed, the journey of the plastic bottles has just begun.

Recycling 101

We all know the drill. On recycling days, large city trucks haul away curbside bags of water bottles, milk cartons, trash bags, and egg cartons. From there, the civilian role in the recycling process is finished, and recycling becomes a municipal responsibility.

After picking up their designated loads, city trucks drive to a Material Recovery Facility, or MRF. Typically operated by private companies, MRFs facilitate the first step of recycling: sorting. Trucks unload material onto the “tipping floor,” a football field-sized pile of recyclables. Giant cranes scoop items onto a conveyer belt, where items are sorted into those that are actually recyclable and those that are not.

Then, plastic undergoes a more rigorous sorting process. The first step entails grouping the seven types according to resin type. Advanced sorting machines use lasers to detect specific polymers, and separate the pile according to tint, transparency, and plastic type. Using a combination of shredders, which cut with scissor-like blades, and granulators, which use rotating blades, the sorted material is converted into uniform, cornflake-sized flakes. These flakes are then washed, melted, and reconverted into pellet form.

Converting plastic into pellets allows for simpler distribution and remanufacturing, and increases the entire speed and efficacy of the recycling supply chain.

A Closed-Loop Supply Chain

What happens to these recycled pellets? CarbonLite, a recycling facility based in Riverside, California, opened in 2012 with the intention of using old plastic bottles to create — you guessed it — new plastic water bottles. The 222,000-square-foot plant recycles more than two billion plastic bottles a year, and is designed to create a national closed-loop, bottle-to-bottle system. CarbonLite’s plastic pellets are shipped back to beverage companies where they’re melted, injected into molds, stretched, and blown back into plastic bottles.

Only a few companies have adopted a fully-recycled bottling system — though if PepsiCo, CarbonLite’s client, could use more recycled rPET (the specific type of plastic found in water bottles), it would. Unfortunately, there’s not enough rPET in the system to sustain an entire company’s worth of products, because on average, only 31% of plastic bottles are recycled.

CEO of CarbonLite Leon Farahnik places the responsibility for increasing recycling levels on government-mandated bottle deposits. In states with these financial incentives in place, a customer is charged an extra amount that can be redeemed at a designated recycling station. The incentive system is proven to work. In California, “scavengers” and “canners” bring the recycling rate to 65-75%. Texas, which doesn’t have such a system in place, only has a 5% recycling rate.