Competing in today’s challenging beverage markets often requires large-scale international distribution. However, this can be expensive, logistically challenging and environmentally damaging. Lightweight refillable PET containers (which can ultimately be recycled to produce new bottles) offer solutions to many of these problems.
They can also offer real marketing advantages because there is an increasing awareness among consumers of the impact that beverage containers make on the environment. Consumers consider returnable containers to be environmentally sound.
Research demonstrates that consumers are correct.
Lightweight refillable plastic containers can significantly reduce transportation costs and environmental impacts compared with traditional (eg, glass) packaging. The continued ‘lightweighting’ of refillable PET bottles is further enhancing this benefit.
It is also reducing the use of materials and energy in bottle manufacture, giving additional environmental benefits. The use of recycled PET in bottle manufacture can reduce environmental impacts even further.
The key cost and environmental benefit of refillable PET bottles, however, comes from the economics of bottle manufacture.
A company using one-way bottles can spend four to five times as much on packaging as a company that bottles the same quantity of beverage in refillable bottles, which need to be replaced only after they have completed 20 trips. The total material used per use of the bottle is 90 per cent lower for the refillable container. This makes multi-trip refillable bottles a very effective long-term packaging solution for the beverage industry.
The benefits of refillable PET containers are likely to increase in future because increasing industrialisation in many countries, scarcity of raw materials, growth in population and political unrest in oil-producing countries are likely to lead to increases in PET resin prices. Although this is unlikely to make PET any less competitive (other materials will be subject to similar pricing pressures) it does mean that maximising use of the PET resin in refillable rather than ‘one-way’ containers will make even more economic and environmental sense.
A study published by the Institute for Local Self Reliance and the Grass Roots Recycling Network (GRRN) in the USA reviewed a number of academic studies on the environmental impacts of refillable and disposable bottles. Across a range of seven environmental impact indicators (CO2 emissions, energy use, water pollution, waste creation and others) they found that every single study favoured refillable bottles.
Only in regard to the production of CO did they find a single report which concluded that single-trip, disposable bottles were preferable to refillable bottles – and four other reports that looked at the same indicator came to the opposite conclusion.
Comparison of different studies and their evaluation of packaging types
(Institute for Local Self Reliance and the Grass Roots Recycling Network)
Deposit-based refillable bottle systems, which provide a cash incentive for the consumer to send bottles back for refilling, offer a number of environmental and economic benefits in addition to those set out above.
For example, experience suggests that overall recycling rates for beverage packaging are higher (and therefore environmental impacts are lower) where the packaging carries a deposit. There is also a beneficial impact on litter in public open space as consumers retain and return empty bottles to recover the deposit.
There may also be new legislation to encourage the future use of refillable containers.
Some countries – such as Germany and Norway – already have mandatory systems for the return and refilling of some beverage containers.
The European Union Waste Hierarchy – transposed into national laws across Europe under Article 4 of the revised Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC) – clearly sets ‘reuse’ ahead of ‘recycling’ as a policy objective. By their nature, therefore, refillable containers better meet the objectives of European legislation than one-way containers.
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