Bottler says recycling plan works
It’s no secret that soft drinks in throwaway plastic bottles are more convenient for the consumer and more profitable for the retailer, since they eliminate the hassle of carting cases full of heavy and fragile glass pints all over the country. But the downside of throwaways… is that they get thrown away… sometimes into already overflowing garbage dumps and increasingly along the nation’s streets and highways. Today the press was given a tour of Bowen and Bowen’s new plastic bottling operation and the company used the opportunity to make a case that it’s on the right side of the environmental divide.
Jose Sanchez, Reporting
After the government has levied a five percent environmental tax on the import of plastic containers and plastic bottles, one of the first complaints lodged against Belize’s largest soft drink producer, Bowen and Bowen, was that they were not paying it.
Nick Pollard Jr., Sales Manager, Bowen and Bowen
“We are paying the five percent environmental tax on all our plastic pre-forms and also on all plastic containers that bring our concentrates. All our concentrates come in plastic containers and we do pay the five percent on the SIF value before duty.”
Other than the tax issue, environmental groups have singled out the company’s plastic soft drink bottles to be the real danger to the environment. To put an end to the finger pointing, Bowen and Bowen has decided to open its factory doors to let the public know exactly what it has been doing.
Michael Bowen, Special Project Manager
“We import pre-forms, the pre-forms are blown. The heat is blown into the bottles. From there, they go through a washer, which has two wash cycles. They’re filled, they’re capped at that point the labels are put on. The date code put on, they’re put into crates and packaged on palates for delivery from the coke factory.”
And from there the soft drinks end up in the refrigerators of stores, ultimately to be consumed by the public. Unlike the glass bottles, which may be returned for twenty-five cents, consumers do not have as much incentive compelling them to properly dispose of the plastic version. Bowen and Bowen Sales Manager, Nick Pollard, says that they always had a solution to that problem.
Nick Pollard
“From before we launched the P.E.T. package, we put in place a buy back programme which allowed all consumers to bring the bottles back to all our distribution centres and get a five cents return. We’ve been doing that from the time we launched in February of 2000. Since then we have invested in an industrial grinder here at the coke factory. We have small grinders in San Pedro, Caye Caulker, and we now have a mobile grinder which we started using two weeks ago that has already made over fifteen trips as far south as Toledo, Big Creek, Placencia, to Corozal. And we are bringing in all the ground plastic.”
That plastic is separated into green and clear varieties, ground and then sold to a company in Hong Kong. But that sale barely covers the cost of the operation.
Nick Pollard
“We are not making money. I can guarantee consumers and television viewers out there we are not making money from this project. As you’ve probably heard earlier, the blades for these grinders are very expensive, we’ve had to invest in a grinder to sharpen the blades. We have people employed to manage the grinders. We have people employed to collect the bottles at each centre from the consumer bringing them in. We have to buy the plastic bags to collect the P.E.T. bottles.”
The boxes, which are forty by forty-eight by forty-two, carry between seven hundred and nine hundred pounds of shredded plastic and it takes between ten thousand and twelve thousand bottles to
fill one box.
Michael Bowen
“We get three cents a pound for uncontaminated, separated plastic P.E.T. For this shipment I’m guessing we are going to get anywhere between twenty-five or twenty-eight hundred dollars U.S. And to ship one container to Hong Kong from Belize costs twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“In Belize and actually for the region of Central America and the Caribbean, we’re the number one return and we get the highest redemption for any Coca Cola bottler. We’re at the forefront of recycling in Belize. There is nothing more that could be done for bringing it back, we offer five cents per bottle, we grind and send them out for recycling.”
Though payment will help to get some bottles off the streets, it might take a bit of civic pride to clean up the entire mess. Reporting for News 5, Jose Sanchez.
Consumers can return their empty plastic soft drink bottles to the Bowen and Bowen distributor in each district for five cents each. Crystal water bottles are not included in the recycling programme.
