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.

As You Sow is a proponent of Extended Producer Responsibility and encourages beverage industry leaders to take more responsibility for the solid waste caused by their discarded beverage containers, and move to increase the level of recycled content in their plastic bottles.

In 2006, As You Sow published a unique survey and report card ranking beverage industry performance on the environmental attributes of containers and efforts on container recovery. Alex McIntosh, Nestle 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..." Partly as a result of dialogue with As You Sow, Nestle 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 part due to As You Sow's efforts, Coca-Cola committed to building the largest bottle recycling plant in the U.S. which will open in 2009.

Click here to learn about As You Sow's 2008 Beverage Container Recycling Scorecard and Report