Plastic Bottle Recycling

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Lynn Bestul. I'm the Solid Waste Planner for New Hanover County in North Carolina. I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about plastic bottle recycling. Plastic bottles are one of the recyclable items that we really don't want people to put into landfills. Plastic lasts forever -- it'll last a lifetime in a landfill and just take up space there. That's one of the primary reasons that we want them recycled. It's also an item that, once it is recycled, the way the process works, it goes through the system and it's ground up -- like mulched up. Then it's sterilized, cleaned, turned into pellets, and then it is made into brand-new plastic bottles. Most of the plastic bottles that you drink your water or sodas from come from recycled material. So it's just very important to do this recycling with the plastic bottles. They...it's an easy item to handle. They don't take up a lot of space in your recycling bins at your house, and one of the easiest things to do is squeeze them together and put the cap back on it. In some recycling facilities, they don't want those caps on, so you'll have to check with your local area to find out if you want the caps back on or not. In North Carolina, in New Hanover County, we can have those caps on, so it...we do process them with the bottles. All these bottles are necessary to be recycled. It's a product that they will use, and we definitely are going to have additional things that we can make from those plastic bottles. That's about all I've got right now for you concerning recycling plastic bottles."