Plastic and Styrofoam

As you may already know, currently here in the Yukon we do not have the ability to process styrofoam even though it is initially made from plastic. The problem is that styrofoam takes up a lot of space compared to it’s weight, and is very hard to properly  compress without special machinery. This makes it far too expensive to ship to southern processing centres. Obviously it is Raven’s goal to process as many materials as we can, but styrofoam simply isn’t feasible without extra equipment. Until that point of time, we can always get better at recycling plastic as we can see from the factoids below.

Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!

Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!

Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as buring it in an incinerator.

Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 styrofoam coffee cups every year.

Facts about water bottles and water

According to environmental consumer watchdog Food and Water Watch, hundreds of thousands of tons of water bottles end up in landfills each year. Less than five per cent of 18 billion kilograms of plastic produced each year is getting recycled.

It takes fossil fuel to produce bottled water. The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic used for the bottles is typically made using natural gas and petroleum. According to the Pacific Institute, production of every ton of PET creates about three tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). The institute estimated that bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of CO2 in 2006 alone.

It takes fuel to ship the bottles, fill them, and recover, recycle, or dispose of them. The institute estimated that the energy used to provide one bottle of water to a consumer could be equal to filling 25 per cent of that bottle with oil.

It takes twice as much as the water in the bottle to produce a bottle of water, so the institute estimated that every litre sold represents three litres of water. If more water is bottled than is naturally replenished in the area, this can drain local ground water levels.