Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [61]
Whether here or there, the bottles are chopped into flakes, then turned into pea-size pellets that can be extruded to make fibers for clothing, carpeting, strapping, and other products. Recycling our bottles is better than trashing them, because it reduces the demand for landfill space, but it isn’t greatly reducing U.S. water bottlers’ demand for oil because most of them aren’t using recycled content.
“There are taste issues with it,” Ron Dyer, an environmental manager at Nestlé Waters, tells me.
“Getting enough of it is a problem,” Stephen Mahabir, plant manager at the Dasani plant in Queens, New York, says. Which is it? I phone Betty McLaughlin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute.
“The bottlers might be wary of being asked to help pay for recycling programs if they started to use significant amounts of recycled content,” she says. That, plus virgin PET costs less than recycled PET.
McLaughlin’s group promotes bottle bills, which require consumers to pay a refundable deposit on beverage containers. Eleven states have such laws for soft drinks and beer, but only three apply the law to water (until January of 2009, that is, when Oregon will become the fourth state). Do bottle bills work? Yes. States with them recycle 60 to 90 percent of their beverage containers, versus a national average of 23 percent for states without. In New York City, where I live, we have a curbside program for narrow-necked plastic containers, and a bottle bill for carbonated drinks. If the state expanded that bill to cover water and upped the deposit from a nickel to a dime, it’s doubtful our streets and parks would be saturated with empty water bottles.
Not surprisingly, bottlers don’t like such bills: the programs cost them a penny or two per container (after scrap revenue and unclaimed deposits are figured in, says the Container Recycling Institute), and they create headaches for grocers who handle all those empties. Every time a new bottle bill, or the expansion of an existing bill, makes it to a state legislature, Coke, Pepsi, and other bottlers hire lobbyists and run ad campaigns designed to stop them. And they usually do.
In a landfill, heavy equipment crushes water bottles, but they still take up space. For how long? No one knows: after all, PET is only about twenty-five years old. But estimates range up to a thousand years. Are the bottles leaching toxins in there? Possibly phthalates from the HDPE jugs, and possibly benzene, nickel, and the ethylenes from other types of plastic. It’s hard to be certain since no one has ponied up funding to pinpoint the sources of these contaminants in landfill leachate.
In incinerators, PET bottles generate about eleven thousand BTUs per pound of bottles—good news for anyone harnessing energy from combustion. But since it takes about forty-nine thousand BTUs to produce one pound of PET, burning it for fuel is plain silly. Incinerating PET also contributes to the formation of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which sound nice but can—some of them—be carcinogenic and bioaccumulative (that is, they build up in the tissues of living organisms). PAHs produced in incinerators end up in stack gases (which drift into the jet stream), in bottom ash, and in the residue collected by sophisticated scrubbers. The same goes for the heavy metal antimony. And where do these sequestered pollutants end up? Usually in landfills.
No one uses more plastic water bottles than Pepsi, which makes the bestselling Aquafina. But it doesn’t fill those bottles close to my home, so I start phoning a plant in Queens that produces the number-two-selling purified water, Dasani. It takes me four months to arrange a tour, but eventually I learn quite a bit about Coca-Cola’s multistep filtering and that water quality