So you’re walking down the street with an empty water bottle in your hand and toss it

in a trashcan thinking “it’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

materials — or 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

you’re 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 we’re 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.