As You Sow engages beverage companies to set container recycling and recycled content goals and beverage and food retailers like to take responsibility for collection and recycling of beverage and food containers left in their restaurant and stores.

In 2012 As You Sow filed shareholder resolutions with Dr Pepper Snapple Group and with McDonald's on their container recycling policies. We withdrew the proposal at McDonald's for 2012 after the company began testing more eco-friendly cups.

>>Recent media clippings for our Beverage Container Recycling initiative

Through shareholder dialogue and the filing of proposals, As You Sow secured commitments from Starbucks and three of the largest U.S. beverage companies for quantitative bottle/can recycling goals:

As You Sow is now building on these successes to engage more broadly with consumer packaging companies in the food and beverage industry though our new consumer packaging initiative.

As You Sow also publishes a unique survey and report card ranking beverage industry performance on the environmental attributes of containers and efforts on container recovery. Alex McIntosh, Nestlé Waters' director of corporate citizenship, credited As You Sow's 2006 Scorecard and subsequent dialogue as "getting our attention and encouraging us to look at the recycling challenge more broadly."

After engagement with As You Sow, Nestlé Waters became the first major beverage producer to support legislation that increases container recovery rates and, in October 2008, the first to support an industry-wide recovery goal for PET plastic. In 2009, Coca-Cola built the nation's largest bottle recycling plant, after engagement with As You Sow on beverage container recycling for several years.

Background
Last year, over 200 billion beverage containers were sold and over 130 billion of those containers ended up in landfills or were incinerated. Beverage container recycling rates have been declining nationally from 54% in 1992 to less than 33% today.

Most people don't realize that beverage container recycling has a direct impact on climate change and energy security. If all of the beverage containers that were wasted last year had been recycled, 15.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases would have been avoided, the equivalent to emissions from 36.2 million barrels of oil, which is equal to 52 days of oil imports from Iraq.

Using recycled materials is one way that beverage companies can reduce emissions and energy use. Making containers from recycled content uses significantly less energy and fossil fuels in their production than using virgin materials: recycled aluminum uses 95% less energy, recycled plastic uses 30% less energy, and recycled glass uses 35% less energy.