Number on the bottom of plastic bottle

When you pick up a plastic bottle and inspect it, there’s a lot scribbled at the bottom, ever wondered what they might be? Well if you are one of the curious lot as some of us then read on.

Whenever we have a plastic bottle in hand, there are thousands of questions running around your pretty head, is it safe, is it hygienic, and many more. The numbers you see printed at the bottom of the container is often a source of many a query forwarded to the man at the counter, some of which he might be able to answer while others are left to the imaginative mind to conjure up.

Well the question now is what do the numbers at the bottom of plastic bottles really indicate? While there are rumors doing the rounds about them being the size of the bottle to they type of plastic used.. Actually anything goes! You have plenty of hoax chain mails doing the rounds on all those mail boxes about how many times the particular plastic has been used. While such information can be totally misleading and inappropriate for the health and use of the user, one should try to make use of the actual meaning of the information that is meant to be supplied at the back of the plastic bottles.

According to a report published in April 22, 2007 keeping in mind health hazards and environmental issues, the number at the bottom of the plastic bottles should ideally indicate the type or quality of plastic which has been used for making this bottle. The number incidentally is also an indication of the grade of plastic that is used.

Most of the reports of such numbers have it that the numbers indicate those from one to seven. Going by this order anything above the number five should be good grade of plastic. It’s a different issue altogether that the gradation has less to do with the safety or usability of the plastic and more with the type it actually is.

So while you can safely assume that five is polypropylene and one is PET the numbers are pretty useful when it comes to sorting out collected bottles for recycling purposes. You might say that these numbers act as identification for the grade of plastic the bottle has. For example while a number 2 is identifiable as HDPE, high-density polyethylene, numbers 3 and 4 are PVC, polyvinyl chloride and LDPE, low-density polyethylene respectively. Similarly, while 7 is qualified as other forms like resins or multi-materials, 5 is PP, polypropylene and 6 is PS/PS-E, polystyrene / expanded polystyrene.