PET recycling levels falling in US – PET recycling US - Arhive
PET recycling levels falling in US
Americans have never loved their PET bottles more, but that affection is not extending to the recycling bin.
New statistics show that both the recycling rate for PET bottles, and the actual tonnage of material collected, fell in 2016.
The National Association for PET Container Resources teams up with the Association of Plastic Recyclers each year to produce a report on post-consumer container recycling. The latest numbers show the recycling rate dropped to 28.4 percent in 2016 from 30.1 percent in 2015. It’s the third consecutive year that the recycling rate has fallen.
And it’s the second consecutive year that the overall tonnage of PET bottles collected has dropped. Recyclers collected 1.75 billion pounds of PET bottles last year in the United States, down from 1.79 billion in 2015, and an all-time high of 1.81 billion pounds in 2014.
The decline in total collection volumes was 2.4 percent, or 44 million pounds.
“This was a strong year for PET bottle growth, but another difficult year for the PET recycling industry,” said Tom Busard, chairman of NAPCOR, in a statement. “The challenges we saw in 2015 — low virgin resin pricing and uncertain demand in both recycled scrap and [recycled] PET end markets — continue to impact the industry in 2016.”
The popularity of PET bottles continued to climb in 2016, with 6.172 billion pounds of containers being put into the market. That’s up from 5.971 billion in 2015 and 5.849 billion in 2014.
The recycling rate has not been this low since 2009, when that number was 28 percent. But because of the continued increase in PET bottle popularity over the years, the total number of pounds of bottles collected was lower at 1.444 billion pounds that year. There also were about 1 billion fewer pounds of PET bottles on US store shelves that year, at 5.149 billion pounds.
Despite similar recycling rates — 28 percent in 2009 vs. 28.4 percent in 2016 — the 2016 PET bottle recycling weight total was about 300 million pounds more than what was collected in 2009.