A little-known fact is that the bottles in use today for soft drinks and many other applications are recyclable. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles are a durable, petroleum-based product that we currently throw away after just one use. Refilling them would extend their service life and reduce our consumption of oil. PET plastic bottles may be reused up to 25 times before replacement. By refilling, we only extract oil once every 25 trips.

By comparison, in a throw-away system, to manufacture a new PET plastic bottle 25 times requires 25 extractions of new oil. It also requires 25 refinings, 25 resin manufacturing processes, 25 moldings, and 25 transportation trips from the oil well to the refinery. Single-serve, throwaways clearly use more energy.

In this time of rising petroleum prices where we are excited to see the fuel consumption of the average automobile improve by 10 percent, why shouldn’t we be ecstatic about fuel savings of up to 2,500 percent? That’s what could be realized with an effective recycling system for PET bottles.

What can you do to support recycling? Write your local congressional representatives. Their contact information can be found here: www.conservative.org/mega-cong.htm

Jay Dresser

Bangor