More than 1.3 billion plastic bottles are sold around the world each day, filling our supermarket shelves, our kitchens, and our waste streams. In 2024, Greyparrot systems detected more than 6 billion PET bottles passing through global recovery facilities, representing the highest tonnage category of waste for the entire year.
PET bottles are widely collected and recycled, but our data also revealed that some were being recovered more often than others. A closer look revealed that sortability even varied within specific product categories, like bottled water.
With Deepnest, we were even able to determine how specific brands stacked up against industry averages for sortability. We kicked things off by analysing two household names.
How we assessed PET bottle recyclability
For this analysis, we focused on two of the world’s largest bottled water brands: Volvic and Evian.
Our team of analysts tracked their products as they passed through six major facilities in the USA and UK, using Greyparrot Analyzer to compare recovery rates with our data on clear and light blue PET bottle recovery.
We benchmarked Volvic and Evian bottles against two key KPIs, tracking them as they entered each facility:
- Recovery rate: the percentage of bottles correctly sorted into the target PET stream.
- Residue loss: the percentage of bottles lost to residue or waste streams.
With a wealth of brand-specific data and two basic calculations, we determined that there was a clear difference between the branded bottles, and our benchmark for clear and light blue PET bottles.
How Volvic and Evian compare to industry standards
As expected, clear and light blue PET bottles tend to perform well in the waste stream. Both “Stage 1” facilities (plants handling mixed material) and “Stage 2” facilities (plants that refine pre-sorted plastic streams) correctly sorted over 90% of bottles. Residue loss did not exceed 13.4% in any facility.
Despite those high sortability standards, Volvic and Evian actually outperformed benchmarks with their clear and light blue PET bottles. Together, they outpaced averages in both categories:
Median recovery (Stage 1 and 2)
- Benchmark: 91.6%
- Volvic and Evian: 93.5%
Highest recorded residue loss
- Benchmark: 13.4%
- Volvic and Evian: 5.5%
This means that these two brands are not only widely collected, but are also reliably sorted for recycling at higher rates than the average clear or light blue PET bottle.
With KPIs recorded, our analysts tallied up the overall recovery rates. They found that a seemingly small performance gap represented millions of bottles.
Why small PET bottle recovery improvements make a big impact
After consolidating the data from all six facilities, we learned that Evian and Volvic bottle recovery was 3.7% above the average.
That sounds like a small gap, but the UK uses an estimated 9.75 billion PET bottles annually. If all bottles matched the design standards of these two leading brands, we could recover an additional 360 million bottles (the weight of 1,000 double-decker buses) every year.
A few percentage points can translate to thousands of tonnes of material, and we finally have data granular enough to identify it. Deepnest has helped us spot the brands that are outperforming their industries – and the packaging design choices that are helping them do it.
Why Volvic and Evian performed better
Higher sortability comes down to a combination of factors including bottle shape, label size, colour, crush resistance, and contrast to name a few. These design details may seem minor, but they make a measurable difference in recovery outcomes.
At Deepnest, we track millions of packaging items across real recycling environments to uncover which features actually help and why.
Curious how your packaging performs? Get in touch to see how it behaves in the waste system and where it could improve.
