The Container Recycling Institute, a non-profit research group, released a new report titled, Trashed Cans: The Global Environmental Impacts of Aluminum Can Wasting in America, that details the global environmental impacts of replacing 50 billion wasted cans each year with new cans made from virgin materials.
“This can wasting represents a tremendous lost opportunity to save energy and resources,” said the report’s author, Jenny Gitlitz.
According to the report, more than half of the 100 billion cans sold in the United States in 2001 were not recycled and last year’s 49 percent aluminum can recycling rate dropped to its lowest in 15 years.
According to the report, the rising tide of can waste is due primarily to a decreasing financial incentive to recycle aluminum cans. “For price for a pound of aluminum cans to people who collect scrap cans for cash hasn’t changed much in the past decade, but the value of a dollar has declined,” said Gitlitz.
“People are also drinking more beverages on the go, away from the convenience of residential curbside recycling bins, and many of these cans are ending up in the garbage,” Gitlitz said. “Consumers in the ten U.S. states with bottle bills, on the other hand, have a $.025-$.10 incentive to recycle, and they are able to achieve recycling rates of 70-95 percent.”
“This report paints a vivid picture of the alarming environmental impacts of this ‘throwaway’ package,” said Pat Franklin, CRI’s executive director. “We hope it will motivate policymakers and environmental advocates to take steps to eliminate the needless wasting of energy and material resources embedded in the billions of cans wasted in America each year.”
In a related issue, Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vermont) is holding a committee hearing on recycling, including a discussion of his own bill: S. 2220, the Beverage Producer Responsibility Act of 2002. The Act would require all beverage containers except milk to have a 10-cent deposit, and be recycled at a rate of 80 percent.
Gitlitz said that passage of the Jeffords bill could enable the national aluminum can recycling rate to climb above 85 percent, as it has in Sweden and several Canadian provinces, where similar legislation exists. “A national deposit law has the potential to recycle 36 billion more cans than we do today, saving the additional energy equivalent of 11 million barrels of crude oil, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 2 million tons, and reducing countless environmental impacts around the world.”
Trashed Cans: The Global Environmental Impacts of Aluminum Can Wasting in America can be ordered from the Container Recycling Institute by phone or on the web at: www.container-recycling.org/publications/order.htm.