The beverage industry buys more than 500 billion plastic bottles – better called crude oil bottles – every year to package its products (because they’re essentially free to them, given that the plastic industry pollutes free of charge). This addiction to these bottles also worsens the climate crisis: The polyethylene terephthalate or PET supply chain emits 9 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in just North America every year, about the same as 2 million cars.
And by the way: we hardly recycle any of the PET bottles – and don’t let them lie to you and say otherwise: the PET industry does NOT invest in recycling infrastructure and doesn’t care.