Document Type
Article
Abstract
Plastic pollution is a pressing issue because authorities struggle to contain and process the enormous amount of waste produced. We study the potential for reducing plastic waste by examining the efficiency with which different polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles deliver beverages. We find that 80% of the variation in bottle weight is explained by bottle capacity, 16% by product category, and 1% by brand. Bottle weight is quadratic and convex function of capacity, which implies that medium capacity bottles are most efficient at delivering consumable product. Local data on PET bottle sales and municipal waste recovery validate the findings. A 20% shift in consumption from smaller to larger bottles could reduce the production of PET waste by over 10,000 t annually in the U.S. alone.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Scientific Reports, Volume 11, 2021.
© The Author(s) 2021
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
APA Citation
Becerril-Arreola, R., & Bucklin, R. E. (2021). Beverage bottle capacity, packaging efficiency, and the potential for plastic waste reduction. Scientific Reports, 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82983-x