The Story Of A Disposable Pet Bottle

From the outside, using plastic bottles seems quite simple: you are thirsty, you buy a plastic bottle from the first place you see, and you meet your water needs. In this article, we will talk about The Story Of A Disposable Pet Bottle.

If you are very thirsty, you drink the water and throw away the plastic bottle. If you are not very thirsty, you carry the plastic bottle with you all day long and drink when you are thirsty; but in the end, the bottle is crumpled and thrown aside.

There is also an inner side to this story: although we are not very aware of it, we actually sacrifice a lot of the stages that single-use plastic/pet bottles go from production to use and throw away. How? Lets see together.

Production of Single-Use Plastic/Pet Bottles

Today, most of the single-use plastic/pet bottles are produced from polyethylene terephthalate (PET). According to PAGEV's Turkey Plastics Industry Monitoring Report, 23% of the total plastic raw material produced in Turkey in the first six months of 2018 were PET.

So what is needed for the production of PET? Crude oil. Therefore, crude oil is extracted from our world through numerous large-scale operations. This process not only emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and harms ecosystems, but also causes the release of a lot of toxins into the environment.

After this stage, crude oil is moving to various refineries to be purified in order to produce solid, liquid, gaseous fuels and petrochemical products. At this point, we have a request from you; Notice how many times we say 'moving' throughout the article.

For every transport operation, keep in mind the fuel consumed by vehicles and therefore the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

Let’s continue; The processed petroleum product moved again, this time to the plastics factories.

 Attention, this stage involves some chemistry: processed petroleum products transported to factories are bonded with various chemicals to form monomers, which go through various chemical processes to form PET. At this point, PET raw material is in the form of small granules. These granules are melted in the workshop, and this melt is injected into plastic molds through the machine. The material is heated and expanded to take the form of the bottle you hold in your hands today – which we hope you will not continue to hold after this writing. Empty pet bottles, on the other hand, are transported back to the factories and go through washing, sterilization, and packaging processes.

Packaged single-use plastic/pet bottles are moved to various food outlets, distributed there, and stored on the shelves to be delivered to their customers. You come and buy a plastic bottle, drink the water and throw the empty bottle either in the trash or in the recycling bin.

Recycling of Pet Bottles

According to the study of Forum PET operating under PAGÇEV, 50% of the plastic bottles produced in Turkey are recycled. According to the study, recycled PET bottles in Turkey are mainly used in fiber production in the textile industry. Unfortunately, as stated in the report, although Turkey is better than many European Union countries in recycling plastic bottles, this level is still insufficient.

​​As you can see, behind a single-use process that may take minutes for you, there are tens, maybe hundreds of stages, and more and more that are born at each stage disappear.

Good news! You can prevent this by changing a single habit. Stop using single-use plastic/pet bottles! Start today; Have a SuCo and be filled with the peace of knowing that you are protecting nature.

In this article, we talked about The Story Of A Disposable Pet Bottle. In our previous article: https://suco.uk/blogs/news/a-historical-and-philosophy-view-of-the-hidden-world-of-the-elements