Today I was surfing the net looking into plastics. What I want to know is what all this PET stuff means and what the numbers on plastic packaging actually mean.

This is what I discovered…

PET stands for Polyethylene Terephthalate. No wonder they call it PET for short!

The good thing about PET which is often labelled like this:

is that it’s widely recyclable.  Most people can just put it into their curbside collection boxes and those nice people at the council will organise the rest for us.

It helps if you take the tops off the bottles, squash them flat and then you can put the top back on the bottle or gather the tops up into a separate plastic bag. So, why do you need to take the tops off? Well, that’s simply because you can’t get the air out of them when the tops on.  We don’t need our air to be taken off to the recycling centre – we can recycle that all by ourselves just by breathing in and out – so it is just a waste of space in the recycling trucks. Less air, more plastic bottles per trip, fewer miles traveled by the recycling trucks. See?

Last Friday I decided to do a raid on Mr Smith’s rubbish bin (I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to him).  Here’s a picture of the PETs I rescued. Cute, hey?