About The Program

The Carolina Plastics Recycling Council formed a Your Bottle Means Jobs campaign to get more of the 6 billion plastic bottles (300,000 tons) discarded each year in the Carolinas back into the production cycle. Our plan for getting more bottles back is to build a Your Bottle Means Jobs media campaign to motivate the public to recycle just TWO more bottles a week. In recycling, they’re helping create jobs, build local wealth, reduce energy and natural resources consumption and reducing the tax and cost burden when plastic bottles are disposed as waste.

You can make a difference, it's easy!
When you recycle, you help give a person a job. 

What do you need to do? Recycle more and support our program! The plastics recycling industry in the Carolinas is robust and growing but needs everyone's help and support to get more bottles recycled. More than 3,500 people are directly employed converting bottles and other plastics to new products like carpeting, clothes and other textiles, plastic pipe, plastic lumber and more bottles. The Carolinas need more of these types of well-paying jobs and investments that will create them. The simple act of recycling more plastic bottles is one way to make this happen.

Only 25% of the old bottles used in making new products come from the Carolinas. The rest are imported domestically or from overseas. When you recycle, a major industry gets into gear to remake those bottles into something new. Plastics recyclers believe in recycling in the Carolinas. They have invested over $250 million in our two states, and there is a production capacity of over 750 million pounds a year, but not enough bottles are being recycled to keep up with this demand.

Each plastic bottle trashed adds cost while each bottle recycled adds zero costs and, in fact, reduces that cost.

Let's do a little math. Don't worry, this math is easy!

That's just two additional bottles recycled each week by each household. That's a pretty easy way to create jobs in the Carolinas and our communities!

Be sure to check out the Success Stories page to see how the simple act of recycling plastic bottles has created jobs for people in the Carolinas.