Project Background & Overview

Introduction

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a common thermoplastic resin of the polyester family and is used to make film, shirts, fabrics and plastic bottles (Ji, 2013). Around 30% of the world’s PET production is used for bottling purposes, and this is because of the good clarity and inertness of the material (Ceretti et al., 2010). Additionally, the substance also does an excellent job of providing a physiochemical barrier to oxygen and carbon, preserving the life of the bottled content. In addition to water, PET is also used to retain carbonated drinks because of this barrier property. The beverages industry use PET bottles for its transparency, relative lightness and potential for recyclability.

Such qualities have enabled the PET bottle to be the most popular form of containing beverages, especially drinking or mineralised water. Globally, it is estimated that a million bottles are purchased every minute and this figure is expected to rise by 20% in the next by 2021 (Laville & Taylor, 2017). Although, this type of bottles is highly recyclable but due to the rapid urbanisation of places like China, the world’s total PET recycling capability would soon be unable to keep up with its production. Fewer than half the bottles produced were collected in the previous year and only 7% of those were actually recycled. The rest either ends up in the landfill or in the bottom of the ocean (Ioakeimidis et al., 2016).

Huge amounts of fossil fuels are used in the processing and transport of PET bottles, which takes a toll on the environments where they are extracted from. A lot of water is also consumed in its manufacturing process. When discarded into landfills, they lie for years and leach more toxic chemicals into the surrounding environment, and may also end up on the street as simple litter.

If plastic bottles do not end up in the digestive system of large marine fauna such as whales, weathering and other physical processes reduce the quantity of the size of the plastic and they end up in the food chain of smaller animals as microplastics. They carry toxins with them that can ultimately be consumed by people (through fish and other types of seafood).

There is a more direct threat from PET to humans. The bottles contain a compound called bisphenol A (BPA), that has been linked to causing low birthweight (LBW) in new born infants (Veiga-Lopez et al., 2015; Huo et al., 2015). Studies have also determined that BPA acts as an endocrine disruptor (Pinto & Reali , 2010) which causes hormonal imbalances in humans, including obesity. There is also research that suggests that it may cause behavioural problems in children through disruption of cerebral growth.

Maldives, an archipelago nation, with few economic resources at its disposal and even fewer options to transport and manage its waste, recently took up the trend of drinking bottled water. Around 10% of the 4-5 kg of waste per capita consists of plastics, many of which comes from the various government and non-government businesses operating in the country.

Maldives Meteorological Service (MMS) maintains 48 number of staff in its payroll and produces an estimated 7,200 PET bottles per annum. This information was obtained by querying the current recreational group within the organisation responsible for providing bottled water on office premises for a nominal fee. When the water bottles are consumed, it is thrown away with the trash and most of it ends up in the nearby landfill of Thilafushi. This strongly implies a need to nationally reduce the total amount of produced PET bottle waste.

This project seeks to completely eliminate the use of PET bottles from MMS through a two-prong approach:

1) Increase awareness of the MMS staff on the adverse environmental, ecological and human health impacts of PET bottles; and
2) introduce an alternative means of hydration that mitigates the problems outlined in (1) by installing a water filtration system cum dispenser on MMS premises.

In addition, the project will also attempt to affect further behaviour change within the staff of MMS through awareness programmes, thereby increasing the adoption of non-bottled sources of water. It will also recount the various health benefits of keeping adequately hydrated during office hours; and ultimately seek to establish an exemplary office environment of environmentally conscious employees. This could potentially lead to adoption of the practise in other SME enterprises (replicability) and bring about a society-wide aversion to the use of such containers for beverages (scalability). The end result would be an overall reduction of PET bottle waste throughout the country.

References


Ceretti, E., Zani, C., Zerbini, I., Guzzella, L., Scaglia, M., Berna, V., … Feretti, D. (2010). Comparative assessment of genotoxicity of mineral water packed in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and glass bottles. Water Research, 44(5), 1462–1470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2009.10.030
Huo, W., Xia, W., Wan, Y., Zhang, B., Zhou, A., Zhang, Y., … Xu, S. (2015). Maternal urinary bisphenol A levels and infant low birth weight: A nested case-control study of the Health Baby Cohort in China. Environment International, 85, 96–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2015.09.005
Ioakeimidis, C., Fotopoulou, K. N., Karapanagioti, H. K., Geraga, M., Zeri, C., Papathanassiou, E., … Papatheodorou, G. (2016). The degradation potential of PET bottles in the marine environment: An ATR-FTIR based approach. Scientific Reports, 6(1), 23501. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep23501
Ji, L. N. (2013). Study on Preparation Process and Properties of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET). Applied Mechanics and Materials, 312, 406–410. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.312.406
Laville, S., & Taylor, M. (2017). A million bottles a minute: world’s plastic binge “as dangerous as climate change” | Environment | The Guardian. Retrieved October 23, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change
Pinto, B., & Reali, D. (2009). Screening of estrogen-like activity of mineral water stored in PET bottles. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, 212(2), 228–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheh.2008.06.004
Veiga-Lopez, A., Kannan, K., Liao, C., Ye, W., Domino, S. E., & Padmanabhan, V. (2015). Gender-specific effects on gestational length and birth weight by early pregnancy BPA exposure. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 100(11), E1394–E1403. https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2015-1724

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