US PET bottle recycling rate falls again – US PET bottle recycling - Archive

The US recycling rate for PET bottles has dropped for the second successive year, claims a report by the National Association for PET Container Resources (Napcor) and the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), with a decline in the containers covered by deposit programmes to blame.

The PET bottle recycling rate fell to 28.4 per cent in 2016, according to the report on Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity, having dropped from 30.1 per cent in 2015. and 31 per cent the year before. Total collection volumes declined by 2.4 per cent, despite an increase of more than 3 per cent in the total volume of PET bottles available for recycling in the country.

The report cited an 11 per cent decrease in exports to Asia and other markets outside North America, marking the sixth year of off-shore decline. However, US and Canadian end market applications observed increased growth of more than 5 per cent.

The recycling rate was calculated by using the total volume of recycled PET material – 1.75 billion pounds (793,786 tonnes) – taken as a percentage of the total volume of PET resin utilised in US bottles and potentially available for recycling, which is 6.17bn/lb (2.8bn tonnes).

Of the 1.75bn/lb collected, 1.37bn/lb (621,421 tonnes) was purchased and processed by domestic PET reclaimers and the other 22 per cent was sold to export markets, making this the lowest export volume reported since 2004.

In regards to rPET utilisation in US and Canadian end market applications, total volumes increased by more than 5 per cent to 1.5bn/lb (680,388 tonnes) in 2016. Fibre, bottle and strapping markets all demonstrated growth in 2016, while rPET use in sheet and thermoforms dropped, likely due to the impacts of low virgin prices on this market segment.