Norway Recycles 97 Percent of Its Plastic Bottles… And It’s Not That Hard!

Despite the attempts over the years to improve recycling programs in the United States, entirely too much of our plastic waste ends up in landfills, or worse floating in the ocean. However, if we look across the ocean to Norway, we see they’ve successfully recycled 97 percent of their plastic bottles, and 92 percent of them have been turned into other bottles according to Positive.News!

So What’s Norway Doing Differently?

Is it that Norwegian people simply care more about the environment, and thus they’re doing things that Americans and British people aren’t doing (with only 28 percent and 43 percent respectively when it comes to recycling plastic bottles)? Of course not; the answer is that Norway took the initiative to improve its recycling rate, and the changes it made were designed to create a big impact.

Changing consumers’ behavior was the first prong of the approach. The first change that Norway imposed to boost its plastic recycling was a deposit fee on bottles. When returning bottles to reverse vending machines, people can get their deposit back. The second prong was that the more companies recycle, the less they had to pay in taxes. With corporations going all-in on this endeavor, the result was that an astonishing amount of plastic bottles had been recycled over the years.

The program has, in many ways, changed the culture of the country. It’s taken the plastic diet many were on and altered it to be more sustainable. Other changes have needed to be made, including proper facilities to handle the plastic bottles and new laws regarding label packaging, plastic use, glue, etc. All of these things together have laid out a blueprint that could easily be copied by other parts of the world.

And if a majority of countries could replicate Norway’s plastic recycling success and improve their recycling rate, that would make an incredible difference in their plastic waste footprint.