Recycling Cans and Bottles is the Beginning

Top five reasons to recycle your aluminum recycling

Recycling is great but re-use is much much better. Recycling a can may save 95% of the energy but reusing a glass bottle approaches 99% energy savings. American companies are very spoiled by disposable packaging because they do not have to pay for the recovery processes. Coke Corp doesn't pay to recover aluminum or plastic so they really do not care whether we buy plastic bottles or aluminum cans--the cost is about the same for them while recycling centers and individuals shoulder the costs and efforts to keep these out of the landfills. If they were forced to go back to returnable glass bottles the cost to them would be around 2 cents per bottle and they are adamantly against this even though it would drastically lower energy use in the beverage industry.

The idea of a whole industry built around putting sugar and chemicals into bottles and cans is repulsive to me. There are a lot of better uses for for the 150 quarts of sugar water each American consumes each year.

If America drank water instead of soda, each American would:
Have 50 gallons more fuel for their cars,
Have an average of 1 less visit to a Doctor or Dentist,
Lose 17 pounds from the reduced calories,
Would keep 450 bottles and cans out of the waste stream.

Recycling is the Beginning. Intelligent Consumption is the Future.