IQS NEWSROOM

This last April, British environmentalist and adventurer David de Rothschild set sail in a catamaran he had constructed entirely from recycled PET bottles. As a statement to the growing global problem of ocean pollution and the need for higher recycling standards, de Rothschild planned to sail to what Planet Green Bottle calls ‘Plastic Soup’, a floating mass of plastic waste nearly the size of Texas suspended in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This British adventure-seeker may have found the most creative way yet to call attention to this pending environmental risk, but plastic engineers and manufacturers have been working towards a solution in more conventional ways for many years. Polyethylene terephthalate, or ‘PET’, is a petroleum-based resin and may be broken down and recycled almost indefinitely. The addition of dies, fiberglass and other composite materials reduce PET’s recyclability, but the majority of PET materials, such as the beverage bottles out of which Mr. de Rothschild constructed his boat, are recycled at a cost relative or lower than that of purchasing virgin materials. Still, many water bottles, soda bottles and other beverage containers never make it to the recycling bin, ending up in landfills, or worse: the Pacific’s Plastic Soup.