According to a report released by the American Bottle and Bottle Recycling Institute and other institutions on the 16th, in the United States, a total of 192.5 billion aluminum, plastic, and glass beverage cans were produced in 1999, with a per capita of 648 and a recycling rate of approximately 41%.
In other words, about 114 billion beverage cans are wasted every year in the United States. Despite this, the recovered portion still saved the country energy equivalent to 32 million barrels of crude oil.
This joint investigation by enterprises, government agencies, and environmental organizations took six months to collect statistics on the recycling of aluminum cans, polyester bottles, high-density polyethylene bottles, and glass bottles.
The report shows that the number of aluminum cans is twice that of polyester bottles in current beverage cans. However, in the next few years, the number of beverage cans will increase by 25%, of which the growth will mainly come from polyester bottles. This adds technical difficulties to recycling. The report believes that if there is no new recycling plan, the recycling rate of beverage bottles will decline in the future.
The average recycling cost of a bottle in the United States is now about 1.39 cents, and the total cost of recycling all beverage cans is about US$1.1 billion per year. According to the report, among all kinds of recycling methods, beverage wholesalers are most effective in paying deposits to the government. The state's bottles and cans recycling rate averaged 78%.