RALEIGH North Carolina's two-year-old bottle ban, which prohibits plastic bottles from being tossed in landfills, has fallen short of its goals; a majority of discarded soda and juice bottles still end up being buried, according to the state.
But the ban is credited with helping increase plastic bottle recycling since it was implemented in October 2009. More than 36,000 tons of plastic bottles were recycled in the fiscal year that ended last July, a 50 percent increase from the last full year before the ban was put in place.
"We're not close to the ideal, but we've seen plastic bottle recycling shoot up, particularly in the past two years," said Scott Mouw, director of the state's recycling office.
The bottle ban was an oddity among state laws - a prohibition that was never meant to be strictly enforced, Mouw said. The law was meant to strongly encourage the recycling of plastic bottles as part of a broader effort to get people to think of bottles and cans as raw materials for manufacturers.
Increased recycling, coupled with the continued slump in construction, has contributed to a statewide decline in per capita waste disposal, to just under a ton in the year ending last July, according to the state Division of Waste Management. That's the lowest level since the state started tracking per capita waste disposal in 1991.
Recycling of traditional recyclable materials, such as plastic, paper, glass and aluminum and steel cans, increased 5.4 percent from the previous year. Including yard waste, local governments recycled 276 pounds of refuse per person in the year ending last July. "I think people have become more aware, and folks are understanding that recycling is part of everyday life now," Mouw said. "There has been a growth of the recycling ethic in the public, and it's noticeable."
More could be done
The ban on plastic bottles arrived with a flurry of public service announcements and events to encourage compliance. N.C. State University's Waste Reduction and Recycling program added more than 100 recycling bins to campus and organized a campaign to make sure students knew not to throw away their soda bottles, said outreach and education coordinator Analis Fulghum.
"We had a flash mob on the Brickyard with 200 students and invited everyone to bring their plastic bottles and recycle them together to let them know about the bottle ban," said Fulghum.
Still, waste audits from the university indicate that 25 percent to 30 percent of the campus' landfill waste is recyclable material. Ryan Collinsworth, a senior majoring in psychology, thinks the university could do a better job encouraging students to recycle.
"I think at sporting events, they do a good job of promoting recycling campaigns," Collinsworth said. "But outside of that, not at all."
Mouw said one key to getting more people to recycle plastic bottles is making it easier.
In 2008, the N.C. State Fair set up four stations where visitors could for the first time recycle aluminum drink cans and plastic bottles. Now during the fair, recycling stations are spread throughout the fairgrounds.
