The program will provide the Town of Falmouth and City of Methuen with funding to upgrade curbside recycling cart programs
Washington, D.C. September 6, 2022 – The Recycling Partnership has selected two Massachusetts communities to receive a grant-funded investment to support the Every Bottle Back initiative, a beverage industry-led effort to reduce the industry’s plastic footprint and to create a cleaner environment. The investment will enable the communities to expand current recycling programs.
The Town of Falmouth will receive $336,000 and the City of Methuen will receive $240,000 which will provide residents in both towns with upgraded 95-gallon curbside recycling carts. The new lidded recycling carts will increase collection capacity, helping to improve recycling rates while reducing waste in landfills. The investments also include funding for community outreach and educational resources on what is and isn’t recyclable, helping to cut down on contamination in the recycling stream. “This program will allow residents in both communities to recycle more, add jobs, and increase capturing valuable recyclables needed to make new products and packaging,” says Haley Gabbard, Community Program Manager at The Recycling Partnership. “We are committed to supporting programs like this across the country to expand existing programs and increase public access.”
“We are pleased to announce our next Every Bottle Back investments in the Town of Falmouth, Massachusetts, and in the City of Methuen, Massachusetts,” said Katherine Lugar, President and Chief Executive Officer of American Beverage. “By investing in these communities, we are able to provide residents with modernized recycling programs to reduce the use of new plastics and ensure that more bottles are efficiently recovered and remade for consumer use through added recyclable collections.”
Launched in 2019 by American Beverage, the Every Bottle Back initiative is an integrated and comprehensive partnership featuring The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig Dr Pepper, PepsiCo and Polar Beverages that aims to improve the collection of the beverage industry’s plastic beverage bottles, which are designed to be 100 percent recyclable.
“The beverage manufacturers and bottlers of Massachusetts are committed to reducing the usage of new plastics by enhancing our efforts to collect and to remake bottles for consumers in the Commonwealth,” said Steve Boksanski, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Beverage Association. “Through this partnership and with these investments, we will be able to expand access to recycling for the residents of Falmouth and Methuen and improve the quality of material collected. We are grateful for this collaborative effort to get every bottle back and look forward to continuing our work together.”
The announced investments in Falmouth and Methuen are part of 25 initial projects that the beverage industry has committed to fund under the Every Bottle Back initiative. These investments will total $16.64 million in committed funding and are estimated to yield over 715 million new pounds of polyethylene terephthalate over 10 years.
About The Recycling Partnership:
At The Recycling Partnership, we are solving for circularity. We mobilize people, data, and solutions across the value chain to unlock the environmental and economic benefits of recycling and a circular economy. We work on the ground with thousands of communities to transform underperforming recycling programs; we partner with companies to achieve packaging circularity, increase access to recycled materials, and meet sustainability commitments; and we work with government to develop policy solutions to address the systemic needs of our residential recycling system and advance a circular economy. We foster public-private partnerships and drive positive change at every step of the recycling and circularity process. Since 2014, we have diverted 770 million pounds of new recyclables from landfills, saved 968 million gallons of water, avoided more than 670,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, and driven significant reductions in targeted contamination rates. Learn more at recyclingpartnership.org.
About American Beverage’s Every Bottle Back initiative:
The Every Bottle Back initiative is an integrated initiative to improve plastics circularity by The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig Dr Pepper, PepsiCo and Polar Beverages alongside sustainability leaders Closed Loop Partners, The Recycling Partnership and World Wildlife Fund. These efforts support individual sustainability commitments undertaken by The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig Dr Pepper, PepsiCo and Polar Beverages. Learn more at www.everybottleback.org.