Winston-Salem Journal Editorial

Plastic bottles will soon be banned from North Carolina landfills and benefits will accrue in both environmental and economic terms.

Four years ago, legislators banned the sending of plastic-bottle waste to landfills after Oct. 1, 2009. The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources will soon begin working with local landfills and recycling programs to implement the law.

The most obvious benefit of the law is environmental. Americans use more than 14.4 million tons of plastic bottles every year and most of it gets thrown away, according to a plastics museum in Massachusetts. That plastic will sit in the landfills for centuries without decomposing.

That’s not just an environmental problem; it’s a financial one, too. Landfills are very expensive to operate and they are more expensive to build. Across North Carolina, urban areas are struggling with the question of what to do with their garbage. Keeping the state’s share of plastic bottles out of landfills is part of the answer.

Dozens of Web sites recommend an entertaining array of ideas for the personal recycling of plastic bottles, mostly soda bottles. The creative among us can fashion coffee makers, bird feeders and dolls from bottles.
CNN reported earlier this year that a man was building a 60-foot catamaran out of plastic bottles and planned to sail it to Australia.

But there may be an easier and more profitable action that North Carolinians can take with their used plastic bottles: Drop them in a recycling bin.

Most plastic bottles contain polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, an easily recyclable plastic that is in high commercial demand around the world. Only aluminum cans fetch a higher price as a recyclable product.

Manufacturers prefer recycled PET because it is less expensive than newly produced PET. It uses less energy to recycle than to produce originally, too, and that helps businesses improve their environmental standing.
Once recycled, PET is used in a wide variety of products that are manufactured all over the world. Much of the synthetic carpet produced in the United States today is made of recycled PET. Kayaks, yo-yos, mittens and polyester fabrics are just a few of the many other products.

With demand for PET so high that manufacturers worldwide are begging for it, it is foolish to throw the product away – especially when it creates an expensive environmental problem as trash.

North Carolina will be the first state in the Southeast to ban plastic bottles from landfills, but this will be a hard law to enforce if North Carolinians don’t cooperate.

It will take so little effort to comply with the new law: We need only to separate our recyclable products from our trash and put them in the appropriate bins.