Students from Fremont Elementary School in Riverside, CA, will celebrate America Recycles Day on Nov. 12 by touring CarbonLITE Recycling (carbonliterecycling.com) to see firsthand how plastic bottles are kept out of the waste stream.

CarbonLite, an HPC Company and one of the world’s largest recyclers of plastic beverage bottles, will host 40 sixth-graders from Fremont who will recycle a plastic bottle of their own at the sprawling, 220,000-square-foot plant. The students also will display an art project, facilitated by the Riverside Art Museum, which they will have created with the recycled plastic pellets CarbonLITE produces, spelling RECYCLE EVERYDAY.

The event is one of thousands across the country being organized as part of the Keep America Beautiful initiative that is the only nationally-recognized day dedicated to promoting recycling in the U.S.

“America’s recycling rate of plastic containers has increased to nearly 31 percent. That’s a move in the right direction, but it’s still equivalent to a failing grade, which is why CarbonLITE Recycling is helping to raise awareness of recycling through America Recycles Day,” says Leon Farahnik, CarbonLITE Recycling’s CEO. “We hope that youths like the Fremont Elementary School students visiting us learn good habits early and pass them on to their own children one day.”

The visit will help the students better understand how CarbonLite turns beverage bottles into the food-grade plastic pellets that are used by Nestlé Waters North America, PepsiCo and other companies to make new bottles. The celebration’s goal is to motivate occasional recyclers to become everyday recyclers and to highlight the environmental and economic benefits of recycling.

Recycling saves energy by reducing demand for virgin raw materials. CarbonLITE’s facility, which processes more than two billion used plastic bottles annually, prevents 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere annually. That’s equivalent to grounding about 40,000 flights from Los Angeles to New York. CarbonLITE’s Riverside plant employs 130 people. The company just announced a second plant, to be constructed in Abilene, TX, which will employ 100 people.