Every day, on average, American consumers purchase more than 500 million beverage bottles and cans. Nearly two thirds of these containers are incinerated or land-filled; more become debris ending up in oceans where plastic is the principal cause of the deaths of more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles per year, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Beverage container recycling rates have been declining nationally - from 54% in 1992 to less than 35% in 2003. Thanks to As You Sow's efforts, Coke-Cola committed to building the largest bottle recycling plant in the US.

Industry beverage leaders like Coca-Cola and Pepsi must 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. While Coke and Pepsi talk about "shared responsibility" for recycling, they have opposed the development of new container deposit ("bottle bill") legislation, the best apparent tools available for capturing large amounts of post-consumer bottles and cans. They have not proposed any alternative methods to reverse declining recycling rates and to significantly increase levels of container recovery. As a result, the public continues to pay for most of this vast waste of resources by subsidizing the cost of landfilling, incineration, litter cleanup and recycling.