Recycling Pet #5

Finally – You Can Recycle PET #5

As of January 2009, we were told that we could no longer recycle any plastics that were PET #5 or PET #6. All of a sudden, I was left with a giant bag of yogurt, sour cream and butter containers. Frustrated by the lack of options, I started to make my own yogurt, but I inevitably had some containers every week that were one of the taboo plastics. However, there is good news on the PET #5 recycling front!

Preserve, a recycling company, has take a giant eco-step in an earth-friendly direction, and has started a nationwide program to collect the PET #5 plastics.

Preserve Gimme 5 promotes and enables recycling of #5 plastics like yogurt cups, hummus tubs and other food containers.

Products packaged in #5 plastic are sold widely, but #5 is not recycled in most communities. By recycling your #5 plastic through the Gimme 5 program, you are saving plastic from being sent to landfills, keeping the plastic local by recycling it here in the USA, and you are powering Preserve by helping us transform your recyclables into new Preserve products.

Preserve Gimme 5 accepts the following for recycling:

• Clean plastic with a #5 stamp in it.
• Preserve products
• Brita pitcher water filters

You have two ways to Gimme 5:

Drop your #5s at a Preserve Gimme 5 bin (available in select Whole Foods Market stores).
Click here for a list of locations.

If you don’t live near a Preserve Gimme 5 location, you can send them your #5s.

Before starting the mail-back Gimme 5 program, we wanted to make sure that we were taking a positive step for the environment. We produced a single factor Life Cycle Assessment to analyze the impact of the Gimme 5 program. The results showed the benefits of keeping #5 plastics out of landfills and remaking them into new products outweigh the environmental impacts of shipping them back to us. We hope that the success of our program will help convince local recyclers of the value of taking #5 plastics back in more communities across the US.

For more information on this program, please click here.