Where does my plastic go? A read-aloud story for ages 5–7

Before you read

A read-aloud story for ages 5–7 about one bottle and its four possible journeys. Reading age 7. On screen it has a read-aloud button, big pictures and alt text; here is the full text so you can read it at home or in class.
Only four facts, each checked. Grown-ups: the sources are in brackets so you can look them up. Made and funded by No Plastic Today. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

This is Bob. Bob is a bottle. Bob is made of plastic.
Plastic is amazing stuff. It is light. It is bendy. It keeps water in and rain out. That is why Bob is made of it.
Bob has one job: to hold a drink for a girl called Ayesha. Ayesha drinks it all. Gulp, gulp, gone.
Now Bob is empty. What happens next? Bob could go on FOUR different journeys. Let's follow them.

Ayesha drops Bob in the bin. A big lorry comes. Bob goes to a place called a landfill. A landfill is a giant hole full of rubbish.
Bob sits in the hole. He does not rot like an apple core. He does not melt like snow. He just stays there. And stays. And stays.
Fact: plastic does not rot away. It just breaks into smaller and smaller bits that stay around for a very, very long time (Chamas and others, 2020: doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635).

Ayesha drops Bob on the ground. Oops. The wind blows Bob into a drain. The drain goes to a stream. The stream goes to a river. The river goes to the SEA.
Now Bob is bobbing in the ocean. A turtle swims past. The turtle thinks Bob's lid looks like food. That is not good for the turtle.
Fact: scientists have counted 914 different kinds of sea animals that have swallowed plastic or got tangled in it (Kühn and van Franeker, 2020: doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2019.110858).

Ayesha puts Bob in the recycling bin. Hooray! A different lorry comes. Bob goes to a factory. He is washed and chopped and melted and made into… a new bottle! Or a fleece jumper! Or a bench!
This is the best ending for a used bottle. But here is the surprise.
Fact: if all the plastic rubbish in the world were piled into 100 big heaps, only about 9 heaps would get made into something new (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2019 figures: oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2022/06/global-plastic-waste-set-to-almost-triple-by-2060.html). Most of the rest go on Journey 1 or Journey 2, and some is burned.

What if Ayesha never needed Bob at all?
Ayesha has a bottle of her own. It is blue. It has her name on it. She fills it from the tap in the morning. She drinks it. She fills it again. And again. And again. Every day, for years.
Her blue bottle never goes to the landfill. It never goes to the sea. It never even needs the factory. Because Ayesha uses it again and again.
Fact: people around the world buy about a million plastic bottles every minute (market research reported by The Guardian, 2017: theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change). Every refill is one less.

So the very best journey for Bob is… not to be needed. Ayesha's blue bottle does Bob's job, again and again.
What could YOU use again and again?
Talk about it: which bin does a bottle go in at home? What do you use again and again already? What would you like to try?

Pair this with the ages 5–7 lesson "What is plastic, and where does it belong?" and the picture tally at the end of the Classroom Plastic Audit. For 8 to 11s use the older version of this explainer, which adds the "why is it only 9%?" question. For 9 to 14s, the TED-Ed animation "What really happens to the plastic you throw away" by Emma Bryce tells the same three-bottle story (ed.ted.com/lessons/what-really-happens-to-the-plastic-you-throw-away-emma-bryce).

Sources last verified 22 September 2026. Page updated 24 September 2026. How we check sources