Plastic

#1 Plastic (water and soda bottles)

Where it goes: Long Beach, CA or Gilroy, CA
What it becomes: fabric for clothing, fruit and vegetable "clamshells"

#2 Plastic (milk jugs and detergent bottles)

Where it goes: Envision Plastics - Chino, CA
What it becomes: plastic bottles

#3-#7 Plastic (all other plastic)

Where it goes: China
What it becomes: carpet, fabric, toys, etc.

Plastic Recycling Facts

• It takes one million tons of plastic to make all the disposable water bottles used in the U.S. each year. The oil used to make this plastic is enough to fuel one million American cars for an entire year!

• Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.

• Americans use 24 million plastic beverage bottles every hour.

• There is an 'island' in the Pacific Ocean, twice the size of Texas, made entirely of discarded plastic. Known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this floating dump receives plastic faster than we can clean it up, and continues to grow larger every day.

• Each week, Americans use 500 million plastic water bottles. Less than 20% of these are recycled.

• It takes 26 recycled water/soda bottles to make one polyester suit. It takes five recycled water/soda bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

• In 1988 we used two billion pounds of plastic just to make bottles for household products. That’s about the weight of 90,000 Honda Civics.

• If every American household recycled just one out of every ten milk/detergent bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of plastic out of landfills every year.

• Each year American throw away 25 billion Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times.