‘Plastic recycling is a dead-end street’, claims Greenpeace. Has the beverage industry got it all wrong?
Greenpeace USA is calling for companies to create a complete industry shift and focus on reuse and refill models over plastic recycling: going as far as to claim that plastic recycling is a ‘dead end street’.
Beverage giants champion the circular model of recycling plastic bottles and reusing recycled content in new bottles as a way to reduce plastic waste and use of virgin plastic. Recycling has long been the ‘right’ thing to do – so why has the environmental advocate now turned its back on recycling?
It says plastic recycling fails because it is ‘difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort for recycling, environmentally harmful to reprocess, often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and not economical to recycle’.
We asked some of the biggest beverage giants what they made of the claims in the report and the models they see as being the most sustainable.
