Recycle Plastic Caps

Vital Stats

Carly G

Venice, FL

  • People Doing It4

The Problem

The problem I am addressing is the amount of bottle caps that are present in our landfills. Although plastic bottles have been recycled for years, no city in the United States collects caps for recycling and they are all sent to our landfills. Not only are these caps taking up room in our landfills but they are also polluting our oceans and forming masses of debris, killing sea life and birds. The largest one of these plastic accumulations is called The Great Garbage patch and is floating between Hawaii and San Francisco, stretching twice the size of Texas and containing 3.5 million tons of trash. The destruction being caused by these dumps can be avoided by giving people an alternative to throwing away hard plastics that are not eligible for recycling.

Plan of Action

I have found companies that will take hard plastics and recycle them into their own products such as Aveda who recycle caps to use for their packaging. Although this program is already available, many people do not know about it so I have decided to raise awareness in my own community and set up local cap collection sites. At a recent Earth Day event at a local state park I spoke to many people, encouraging them to save their caps and tell their friends to collect theirs as well. Just by word of mouth I have already received two 35 gallon bins full of caps from friends alone. Also, several of my local Meals on Wheels (bringing meals to elderly people) distributors have begun collecting caps from their elderly customers after hearing about the issue through me. I hope that by getting the word out and making the collection of caps easy for people I will be able to reduce the amount of plastic waste being deposited into the garbage swills floating in our oceans and hopefully encourage other people and communities to do the same.
Go
Recycling

Related Stuff