Turning Trash into More Trash

The bottled water industry tries very hard to convince consumers that buying their product is fine, because all those empty bottles are recyclable. What they don’t address is exactly what plastic bottle recycling often entails.

Check out this video from National Geographic for a closer look at the process plastic bottles go through in order to produce polyester clothing in China.

As the video shows us, plastic bottles are collected in various locations, like here in the US, or over in Europe. Then, the plastic bottles are shredded up, packaged in cellophane, boxed up into giant presents of plastic goodness (a valuable commodity, of course) and sent on a 7,000-mile trip to China. The plastic then goes through an unimaginably complex process involving boiling, rotating, drying, melting, spinning, bonding, tearing, packaging, scraping, threading, weaving, looping, and brushing until the polyester textile is made. But never fear, the stylists are very economical while cutting out the templates prior to the polyester being sewn–they wont create anymore waste than necessary. Phew!

Now, if the workers aren’t decapitated by one of the ‚spinning ovens,” or have their skin burned off by the ‚corrosive, caustic soda” used to remove the sticky labels from the plastic, they should be fine. Except for the fact that they are constantly breathing in toxic fumes, which is also pretty bad.

In reality, this entire process gives off carcinogenic fumes that are likely doing more damage to workers bodies than we could know at this point. Check this story out about three Chinese workers at a recycling shop who recently died from handling plastic scraps. The likelihood that this is an isolated incident is very low.

Furthermore, how much energy is this entire process consuming? There are giant machines with complicated, fast-moving parts—no doubt this process is eating up an excessive amount of energy, further contributing to our dire global warming problem. And all for what? Some trashy textiles?

This video unveils one way in which plastic water bottle recycling is incredibly wasteful and dangerous. The only alternative that makes sense is to not make plastic bottles to begin with. That way, there are no bottles to throw away, or recycle into new problems.

- Kelly Barrett