Daily waste into daily bread

This year the common sense habit of recycling your daily waste needs to become as natural as eating your daily bread – create work, and food, for many.

This is a 21st century life skill finally embedding itself into the consciousness of our society in our journey of realigning ourselves with the natural cyclical systems of nature, upon which we depend.

In South Africa we are able to reprocess all the PET clear plastic bottles on the market, as none are exported overseas. No matter where you live, you CAN ensure your bottles are not landfilled, but become part of the recycling loop and re-crafted into other useful items. This also keeps the plastic out of the oceans.

Research conducted by the UK based recycling organization Recoup, has shown that if plastics were no longer used in packaging the weight of packaging materials would rise by 300%, the volume of rubbish would expand by 150% and the energy consumed by the packaging industry would increase by 100%.

There are a myriad of good reasons to recycle your plastic. Here are a few:

• PET Plastic bottles are valuable; we don’t export them but reprocess them in South Africa into fibre for pillow cases, duvets, T-shirts, roof insulation, geotextiles and most importantly back into PET plastic bottles thereby closing the loop.
• Increasing PET plastic bottle recycling leads to job creation in the waste management, product development, manufacturing and marketing sectors.
• The waste hierarchy has changed and we need to landfill less. ‘Waste is not waste until it is wasted.’
• Recycling reduces landfill requirements, thus increasing the life of landfill sites and cutting disposal costs. Landfill costs are set to rapidly increase over coming years.
• Recycling demand for PET plastic bottles outstripped supply for many years. Our recyclers need your PET plastic bottles.
• PET Plastic bottle recycling provides a valuable public service. The public want to recycle plastics and there is high demand for this service.
• Plastics are the material of choice for many manufacturers and will form an increasing proportion of household waste in the future.
• Beverage PET in South Africa represents 2.5% of the total volume of paper and packaging waste; 3.5% of packaging waste (without paper) and 14% of all plastic packaging.
• PET Plastic bottles are widely used, abundant and very visual. There is the potential to remove a significant amount of volume from the waste stream.
• Recycling 1 ton of PET plastic bottles saves 1.5 ton of carbon it also decreases the need for raw materials and saves energy.
• Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W light bulb for up to 6 hours

Please participate in your local separation at source projects and drop-off your PET plastic for recycling. Visit www.petco.co.za for more information. If you want to get involved, chat to Lynn du Plessis at 0217889954.