PET Recycling
Watch our short animated video to learn how a PET container gets recycled and what happens between the recycling bin and its next life as a new product.
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When you buy a product packaged in PET, you’ve chosen a package with an established, accessible end-of-life option—recycling. From a curbside bin or wherever you bring your recycling, PET containers are collected, sorted, processed, cleaned, and then remanufactured into a variety of new products, including fiber for clothing and carpets; fiberfill for soft furnishings and sleeping bags; pallet strapping; food and non-food bottles, and thermoformed packaging such as cups and take-out containers.
Recycling a PET bottle keeps it out of the landfill, but it does much more than that. Recycled PET resin is a valuable manufacturing feedstock that can be reprocessed and reused in bottles over and over again. Recycling instead of landfilling, then using that reprocessed PET material as a raw material for new products, greatly reduces the greenhouse gas and carbon emissions impact and requires less overall energy to produce the new product.
Nearly 1.6 billion pounds of clean recycled PET went back into the production of new products—such as those pictured above—in the U.S. and Canada in 2018.
Watch our short animated video to learn how a PET container gets recycled and what happens between the recycling bin and its next life as a new product.
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Learn about the impacts of PET packaging on energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, even jobs and local revenues.
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