500 Bottles: Just How Far Can One Household’s Recyclables Go?

The typical American family discards 500 bottles each and every year. An overwhelming amount of these bottles are finding their ways into landfills, rather than recycling centers. In fact, 2.5 million plastic bottles are dumped into landfills in just one hour!

At Waste Wise, we find this to be a very unfortunate series of events. It will take an average of 1,000 years for each of these bottles to biodegrade. In the process, these plastics will leak toxins into the ground that they are buried into. It has always been our passion to see old discarded items as they go through the recycling process, where each item is regenerated into a completely new and fully functioning product – such as picnic tables, lounge chairs and building materials.

If more people took the time to properly recycle their unwanted waste, the amount of energy and resources that could be saved are quite significant. In fact, it requires 66% less energy to create new items from recycled plastics than it does to generate the same items from raw materials. Just as energy would be saved, precious space on the planet could be preserved at the rate of 30 cubic years per ton of plastic.

The Impacts of Recycling on the Home

For each plastic bottle that is recycled, consumers have just saved enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for 6 hours. Don’t find that impressive? If we recycled all 500 plastic bottles from the average American household, we have just saved enough energy to power that same light bulb for 3,000 hours! That’s enough electricity to power a light bulb 24 hours a day for 1/3 of the year – Not that we would waste that much electricity, of course.

Now let’s take a look at how plastics can be transformed from unsightly trash into an aesthetic home accent. One year worth of discarded bottles contains enough material to create a 4 1/2 by 6 foot area rug. That’s 26 square feet of carpet that benefits both the inside of the home, as well as the outdoor landfills.

Speaking of the outdoors, plastics can also be recycled and turned into a variety of items that can take an outdoor space from drab… to fab! Everything from chic bistro sets to traditional plastic picnic tables can be created from old water bottles.

In addition to patio furniture such as picnic tables and lounge chairs, plastic bottles can also be transformed into durable, low maintenance building materials. For every 500 water bottles that are recycled, 5 planks of six-foot long composite lumber can be manufactured. These materials can be used to build everything from pergolas and gazebos to park benches and outdoor decks.

No matter what these plastic bottles are transformed into, recycling them is guaranteed to be better for the environment than if they were left to biodegrade in a landfill for the next ten centuries. The future of plastics is a bright one, and the future of recycled plastics is even brighter.