Report | January 29, 2020
Just One Word: Refillables
How the soft drink industry can – right now – reduce marine plastic pollution by billions of bottles each year.
Refillable bottles are multiple-use bottles, made of glass or PET plastic, that beverage companies own and that are returned by customers, who are incentivized to return them through deposit return schemes, and then cleaned, re-labeled, refilled, and sold again. Beverage companies report that they use refillable glass bottles up to 50 times and refillable PET bottles up to 20 times before they are retired and recycled.
Oceana analyzed packaging market data for the nonalcoholic beverages industry, the market share of PET bottles, and plastic marine pollution data in 76 coastal countries around the world to estimate the total amount of PET plastic bottle marine pollution and the potential of increasing the market share of refillable bottles to reduce marine pollution from PET bottles.
Our analysis found that, based on marine pollution rates from a recent scientific study published in Science and on 2018 beverage and packaging sales information from the market analytics firm GlobalData, between 21 and 34 billion PET bottles, out of 445 billion liters of beverages sold in PET bottles, become marine pollution every year. We also found that increasing the market share of refillable bottles by 10% in all coastal countries in place of single-use throwaway PET bottles could reduce PET bottle marine plastic pollution by 22%. This would keep 4.5 billion to 7.6 billion PET bottles per year out of the ocean. A 20% increase in refillable market share of glass and PET bottles in place of single-use throwaway PET bottles could reduce marine plastic pollution by 39%, keeping 8.1 to 13.5 billion PET bottles out of the ocean every year, based on 2018 data.
Refillable bottle systems were formerly the primary delivery system for beverage companies around the world. Beverage companies have significantly reduced the market share of these systems and replaced them with single-use plastic bottle systems. India’s refillable beverages share, for example, went from 86% in 1999, to just over 37% in 2018.
