Last week, America’s leading beverage companies in partnership with the City of Baltimore announced the city of Baltimore as the next Every Bottle Back Initiative investment.  Together, the beverage industry, The Recycling Partnership, Closed Loop Partners, Dow Packing & Specialty Plastics, the Baltimore Civic Fund, and Rehrig Pacific invested $9.5 million to greatly expand residents’ access to safe, effective recycling and improved collection infrastructure.

This first of its kind collaboration will provide free recycling carts to 205,000 households to help collect and process more recyclable materials, including our 100% recyclable beverage bottles and cans.  As part of the effort, the city will launch a recycling education campaign to inform the community about the new carts and what can and cannot be recycled.

Our collective investment is estimated to generate 40 million new pounds of all recyclables per year – an 80% increase of recyclables per household in Baltimore.  Additionally, the program is estimated to capture nearly 30 million new pounds of plastic over 10 years, including 16 million new pounds of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) that might otherwise have gone to waste.

Ellen Valentino, the executive vice president of the MD/DE/DC Beverage Association stated, “local beverage bottlers and beverage distributors share the goal of keeping plastic out of the environment and we welcome this collaboration between the city, businesses and sustainability groups to ensure recyclables are collected and remade into new products as intended.”

This investment in Baltimore is one of many steps the beverage industry is taking to get #EveryBottleBack.

For more information on the project, please click here.