Sustainability Resources

PET PLASTIC IS EFFICIENT, LIGHT, RECYCLABLE —
WITH UNMATCHED SCOPE FOR RECYCLED CONTENT

A sustainable package must first serve its essential function: to protect its content, delivering it safely with all of its taste, color, form, and other features intact, thereby limiting waste through product damage and spoilage. PET does all this and more.

PET packaging is increasingly lightweight, allowing products to be shipped efficiently, enabling lighter secondary packaging, and reducing fuel requirements and greenhouse gas emissions during product transport.

Meanwhile, consumers are doing their part by recycling more than 3 billion pounds of PET annually in North America—valuable raw material that goes directly back into domestic recycling and into the production of new PET packaging and other products.

The specific impacts of both virgin and recycled PET can be measured through Life Cycle Analysis studies and comparative metrics, as well as social impact studies. That’s how we know that the environmental and economic impacts of PET recycling are impressive.

How impressive? If each person in a city of about 200,000 people—Providence, Rhode Island, for example—recycles just one PET water bottle per day, here’s what happens when this recycled material is processed for use as a raw material.

*Greenhouse gas and energy impacts are based on 1,684 tons of PET recycled and utilized as a raw material instead of landfilled, and are calculated using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Waste Reduction Model (WARM) tool.
*Economic impacts are derived by NAPCOR from data in two published studies, “ReturningToWork: Understanding the Jobs Impacts from Different Methodis of Recycling Beverage Containers” Container Recycling Institute, December 2011, and “Recycling_Economic Impact Study Update: Deleware, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania Final Report,” Northeast Recycling Council, February 2009.