Building a more sustainable future for Michigan with recycling
This month we celebrate America Recycles Week, an opportunity to renew our commitment to protecting our environment from waste and pollution. Michigan’s beverage industry is doing its part by carefully designing our plastic bottles to be 100 percent recyclable, including the caps, and investing in recycling systems to improve our state’s 17 percent recycling rate and get our bottles back so they can be remade into new bottles.
In the last year, Michigan’s beverage companies have supported three important projects to advance our industry’s goal of creating a more circular economy for our bottles.
Last November, we partnered with the American Beverage Association’s Every Bottle Back (EBB) initiative to invest $800,000 to reopen, rebuild and modernize Ann Arbor’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). Our investment is helping to rebuild Ann Arbor’s MRF from the ground up with upgraded equipment and infrastructure to sort, clean and bale recyclable materials.
These state-of-the-art upgrades will allow for more valuable recyclable materials, like our beverage bottles, to be efficiently captured via curbside which will help boost recycling rates and revitalize the city’s recycling program. Our Every Bottle Back investment is estimated to yield 7 million new pounds of recycled plastic which will be used to make new bottles and other consumer goods.
Then in April of this year, we invested $68,000 in Marquette County to provide free higher-capacity recycling carts to 4,450 households. These investments benefit thousands of families in the Ishpeming, Marquette and Negaunee Townships, enabling residents to recycle more of their valuable materials. In fact, this investment will help yield more than 8 million new pounds of recyclables over 10 years.
Over the next 10 years, we estimate that these two investments will generate nearly 300 million new pounds of all recyclable materials — including our beverage bottles and cans — that could have otherwise been wasted in landfills or wound up in the environment where they don’t belong.
In addition to investing in modernizing recycling infrastructure across the state, we’re also working to support efforts already underway to raise consumer awareness about the importance of recycling. We contributed $75,000 to the Capital Area Recycling Education Center in Lansing to support their work educating consumers on the lifecycle of our plastic bottles and how they are intentionally designed to be recycled and remade into new bottles.
But we could not have done this on our own.
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Every Bottle Back is our industry’s integrated and nationwide initiative launched by The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig, Dr. Pepper and PepsiCo alongside leading environmental groups to reduce the beverage industry’s plastic footprint. We know there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to helping a region improve its recycling infrastructure, so we’re working with local communities and key stakeholders, like nonprofits Closed Loop Partners and The Recycling Partnership, to craft solutions that make a sustainable impact.
It is because of innovative public-private partnership like these that more Michiganders are able to keep plastic out of the environment. And, there’s more to come.
This America Recycles Week marks an impactful year where we continued to further our goal of building a more sustainable future for Michigan. Looking ahead to next year, we remain committed to working with all those who share our goal of ensuring that all our industry’s bottles are recycled and remade as intended.
Derek Bajema is president and CEO of Michigan Soft Drink Association.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Modernizing the recycling infrastructure to boost recycling rates
