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  • This episode of DNews is brought to you by the Toyota Prius. Let’s lead the way.

  • So youre walking down the street with an empty water bottle in your hand and toss it

  • in a trashcan thinkingit’s one bottle. It’s not the end of the world if I don’t

  • recycle it.” Well, that one little bottle can make a big difference.

  • Hey guys, Amy here with DNews.

  • Plastics, and specifically plastic bottles, are one of the fastest-growing elements of

  • municipal waste in America. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that as

  • much as 12 percent of all U.S. solid waste is plastic products. That’s a lot, and it’s

  • something we can actually do something about.

  • Water bottles are typically made of polyethylene terephthalate or PET, and it’s delightfully

  • easy to recycle and reuse.

  • When a PET bottle is recycled, it’s sent to a facility where it is ground down into

  • flakes, cleaned, then melted into small pellets. Those pellets can then be used to make new

  • bottles — a far more energy and cost efficient process than making a new bottle from raw

  • materialsor recycled into something different.

  • When a PET bottle isn’t recycled, it goes to a landfill. And because it’s not biodegradable

  • it will sit there forever, taking up space and letting material that could be reused

  • just sit there.

  • The average American uses about 167 bottles of water each year. With about 316 million

  • people living in this fair country, that amounts to 52,772,000,000 plastic water bottles every

  • year. And of those 167 bottles, that average American only recycles 38 bottles, so that’s

  • about 12,008,000,000 recycled around the country. That means a little more than 40 billion bottles

  • end up in landfills, which is equivalent to more than $1 billion in plastics.

  • Granted, plastic water bottles are convenient. It’s great to be able to grab a bottle when

  • youre rushing through an airport and dehydrated, but we need to stop throwing them all away.

  • About 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space is saved for every ton of plastic that is recycled.

  • Which is good, though were not exactly experiencing a landfill shortage. Though the

  • number of landfills in America have decreased in the last two decades from nearly 8,000

  • sites to a little over 1,600, the average size has increased meaning they can store

  • more materials. But recovery of materials, like plastic bottles sent for recycling, has

  • also increased in the same time frame.

  • And we can keep that trend going. If every person held on to one bottle a little longer

  • until they found a recycling bin, we could save both resources and space. It’s a really

  • small thing to do, but the impact is significant.

  • So, how often do you guys cart old bottles around until you find a place to recycle them?

  • Let us know in the comments below or you can catch me on Twitter as @astVintageSpace. And

  • don’t forget to subscribe for more DNews every day of the week.

This episode of DNews is brought to you by the Toyota Prius. Let’s lead the way.

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