Do You Know How Many Plastic Bottles Are Sold Every Minute?
Take a guess — and then find the answer here
In 1978, I was a single mother working at a low-paying job and trying to bring home a paycheck sufficient to feed my family. My trips to the grocery store were for milk, eggs, brown rice, beans, and onions. I don’t think I ever walked down the soda aisle. So, I didn’t notice that year when Coca-Cola switched from glass to PET plastic bottles.
PET stands for “polyethylene terephthalate.” Sounds dangerous, and it is. The production of PET in North America alone spews 8.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air and 200 million pounds of toxic chemicals into both air and water — every year. The results are frightening:
- The production of PET causes air pollution, which results in “serious cancer risks, far greater than any other hazardous air pollutant.”
- Discharges from the production process get into our drinking water. If you don’t get cancer from breathing, you may get it from quenching your thirst, even if you’re drinking water from the tap instead of water or soda from a PET plastic bottle.
- If you are drinking from a PET plastic bottle, you may be damaging your lungs, heart, or stomach from chemicals used to speed up the PET production.
- Have you heard about endocrine disrupters? Here’s a list of a few disruptions to your health that are associated with PET: your ability to have children, breast cancer if you’re a woman or prostate cancer if you’re a man, nervous system disorders, obesity, heart disease,… the list goes on.
Enough. You get the point.
Here’s the number of plastic bottles sold:
- Every minute: one million
- Every day: 1.44 billion
- Every year: 525.6 trillion
Now, don’t blame all companies using PET bottles for the pollution that PET production creates. Some companies are using recycled PET to produce new PET. I can’t find out how much environmental and human degradation is avoided by starting with existing PET, but it has to be better than starting with mining oil.
Also, don’t blame Coke for all of it. The Coca-Cola corporation, with its more than 500 brands, is responsible for only about 100 billion of the 525.6 trillion. That’s enough for me to use Coke in my grocery store as an example of corporate malfeasance, but it’s only about one-fifth of the total amount of disease in the world caused by PET production and use.
Instead, put blame where blame is due: on all the corporate CEOs who consider that the amount of disease in the world caused by PET production and use is acceptable if it will make them even more money than they already have.