Not Your Pet

Plastic bottles — the kind made from #1 or PET*, like the ones that will be used at the water-bottling plant in Elko New Market — can be completely recycled. 

That's the green-washing story we hear all the time, but they're really part of the way oil companies keep pumping more of their product and maintaining or growing their markets as the renewable-energy ground shifts beneath them.

Clean-energy entrepreneur Assaad Razzouk today had a thread about PET that told me some facts I didn't know.

• Aside from its origins in oil, he emphasized the air and water pollution that's generated when the plastic is created.
• The finished material migrates antimony into the food and drink that is stored in it. This element is not an essential part of the plastic; it's added to speed up production.
• North American production of PET plastic emits 9 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, the equivalent of about driving 2 million cars.
• Only 10% of PET bottles are recycled to new PET, with another 10% "downcycled" into another product.

It's true that, unlike almost all other plastics, PET can be fully recycled back into PET, but the current economics are set up to encourage bringing new oil into the supply chain. And of course, I would argue that a lot of this bottled water is unnecessary in the first place if we returned to the infrastructure of public drinking fountains we used to have, and recognized that the "eight cups of water a day" idea is a myth.

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* Even the name we know it by, PET, is misleading. Intellectually, you can know that those letters must stand for a chemical, but they still register subconsciously as the friendly word "pet" when their real meaning is "polyethylene terephthalate."