The Story of a Plastic Bottle

This is a story of a plastic water bottle. You may think it starts with you purchasing it from a store, cracking it open, and throwing it away; but its life starts a long time before that.

First, this bottle needs to be produced. If we don’t recycle our plastic products, this bottle has to be produced from new, virgin materials. It’s original material, crude oil, first needs to be extracted from the Earth, producing countless pollutants and contributing to habitat loss in the process. After this oil is extracted and transported, it must be processed and refined to create virgin plastic #1 (PET). These PET pellets are melted together using high heat and pressure. Then, the virgin PET is injected into a mold and blown to create a plastic bottle. Lids and labels are produced, requiring more materials and pollution, and all of this occurs before it reaches our shelves. Even though this is the story of just one unrecycled plastic bottle, 1.1 billion of these bottles are created every minute.

But, what about a recycled bottle? A recycled bottle’s story starts with you. To protect our environment, you drop your plastic bottle in a WWRA collection bin. After we separate it in our Materials Recovery Facility, PET plastics are sent to Clean Tech in Dundee, MI. There, they are washed, shredded, and then turned into pellets. These pellets are used to make a new bottle, using recycled materials. On average, recycled bottles use 3.8 less barrels less of crude oil and 5,774 Kwh less energy per ton.

A plastic water bottle’s story doesn’t start when you drink it, but it doesn’t need to end there either.