Plastic Bottle Weights and Recycling Economics
PET Bottle Statistics
Since 453.59 grams equals 1 pound, there are roughly 19 twenty-ounce PET bottles in a pound. A two-liter PET bottle weighed 68 grams in 1980. Now it weighs 42 grams. The average 0.5 liter PET water bottle weighs 9.9 grams, nearly half of what it weighed in 2000.
Between 2000 and 2014, the average 16.9-ounce single-serve PET water bottle weight declined 52 percent to 9.25 grams.
Recycling Values and Profitability
A pound of plastic bottles gets you around $1.20. If a bottle costs 10 cents, you need 1,000 bottles to make $100.
Less than 10 percent of everyday plastic packaging actually gets recycled in the UK.
An empty 500ml plastic bottle weighs around 10 grams.
Plastic recycling can be very lucrative if time, effort, and investment are put into the manual sorting process.
Copper is the most profitable metal to recycle, worth up to $2.85 a pound.
Aluminum is worth up to 65 cents a pound. An empty aluminum can has a value of between 1 and 2 cents depending on location.
2L bottles support about 4lbs each to float instead of simply not sinking.
International Recycling Rates
Upon completing the experiment, small-sized PET bottles – 350mL and 600mL – were selected as the basis to calculate the bottle equivalent of one kilogram of plastic waste since they are the most commonly available size during collections.
Indonesia – No. of small raw bottles in 1 kg: 53.08 bottles.
Philippines – No. of small raw bottles in 1 kg: 59.69 bottles.
Weighted average: 56.39 bottles.
Weights were assigned based on the approximate percentage of the number of samples in both countries. Based on weighted averages, the result indicates that, on average, 56.39 bottles of PET plastic are equivalent to one kilogram of collected plastic.