1. Water Bottles Photo: Bottled water Photo by Steven Depolo, Flickr Creative Commons

2. How many water bottles have you used this week? Creative Commons Image Bottled Water

3. The problem with PET bottles Made from a non-renewable resource Do not biodegrade Do not recycle on a closed-loop system Creative Commons (Attribution 3.0 )

4. DMT Ethylene Glycol How PET plastic is made In the process of making the bottle, two chemicals are zipped together to form a polymer chain.

5. This zipping produces a polymer to form the PET molecule

6. Lifecycle of a PET water bottle

7. Recycling can make this.. But we still use PET bottles so we are still using petroleum

8. What if the Lifecycle of a PET water bottle looked like this…

9. In 1996 the DuPont Company won a presidential Green Chemistry Award for Petretec - or the unzipping of the polymers in PET

10. Petretec chemical reaction http://academic.scranton.edu/faculty/CANNM1/industrialchemistry/industrialchemistrymodule.html This means that we can now make old PET bottles back into new PET bottles.

11. Has the problem been solved? Made from a non-renewable resource The non-renewable resource is now renewable…sort of! Do not biodegrade The new material still does not biodegrade Do not recycle on a closed-loop system Petretec is a closed-loop recycling system but is only used for a fraction of the beverage bottles used in the world.