Important Facts about Recycling Plastic Bottles to Save Trees

Recycling plastic bottles helps clean the oceans and even helps save trees.Dust water image by Pupkin from Fotolia.com

Recycling plastic bottles has potential benefits beyond reducing the volume of useful materials permanently lost in landfills. If we recycle properly, we reuse resources, cutting demand for new materials. Besides reducing the use of non-renewable materials, recycling potentially can reduce pollution and greenhouse gases that damage or kill forests, oceans, and other life-sustaining ecosystems. Recycling plastic bottles does not save trees as directly as recycling paper does, but it reduces acreage converted to landfills, saving forestland.

Old Plastics to New Products

Producing new plastic from recycled material uses only two-thirds of the energy required to manufacture it from raw materials. According to Recycling Revolution.com, as of 2010, Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour. Most of them get thrown away, not recycled. Americans represent only 5 percent of the world's population, but generate 30 percent of the world's garbage. If we recycled plastic bottles more and reused them, we would cut out tons of landfill space.

The UCLA Student Group for recycling reports that one ton of paper, made completely from recycled paper scrap, saves 3 cubic yards of landfill space and 17 trees (2010). Recycling plastic bags and bottles saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator, which can also adversely affect trees--and humans--by filling the air with harmful toxins.

You can use plastic bottles to save trees directly. The SosteNica/CEPRODEL's reforestation project encourages farmers to use 3-liter plastic bottles to create drip-irrigation systems for particular plants. Drip hoses are expensive and dry up limited water resources. Farmers and novice gardeners can use the method in any part of the world.

To use the plastic bottle as an irrigation tool, make a half-inch to one-inch hole in the bottom of the used plastic bottle. Hang the bottle upside-down from a stake supporting a young tree sapling. Instead of watering the tree from a hose or a full watering bucket, fill the bottle with water. Unscrew the cap just loose enough until water begins to slowly drip down onto the sapling soil. Adjust the water flow by tightening or unscrewing the cap more. Being resourceful can save trees around your house or neighborhood. Consider starting a community project to reuse plastic bottles.