Using safe plastic drinking water bottles is one way to help reduce the impact to the planet of consuming plastic. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” still are the best ways to help the environment especially when you read these overwhelming facts about plastic bottles:
- It takes 700 years for plastic bottles begin composting
- Nearly 7x as much water is used to make and transport one kilogram of bottled water as is in the bottle
- 90% of the cost of bottled water is due to the bottle itself
- 80% of plastic bottles are not recycled. More than 60 million plastic water bottles end up in landfills or incinerators every day.
- In 2006, Americans drank an average 167 bottles of water each for a total of 50 billion bottles (total spent $15 billion). Of that total, only 23% was recycled.
- 24 million gallons of oil are needed to produce a billion plastic bottles. Currently, the amount of oil we use to produce water bottles each year (17 million barrels) could fuel over 1,000,000 cars for an entire year.
- If you drink 2 Liters of tap water a day, it only costs you 50 cents per year to drink. Drinking the same amount, but bottled will cost you nearly 1000 times more.
The story of bottled water
When I was a kid, we would normally drink straight from tap. We usually drank from glass and then suddenly, we find ourselves searching for safe plastic drinking water bottles.
These days, a lot of us cannot imagine drinking tap water and I have often wondered what happened between then and now that made plastic bottled water a hit. In this video, Annie Leonard provides some very interesting answers to our obsession to bottled water.
To know more about the story of bottled water and how our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet, our communities, and our health, check out the book from the host of the Internet film sensation “The Story of Stuff”, Annie Leonard.
How much plastic trash are you contributing to the pile of plastic garbage each day?
How much do you spend buying plastic bottled water each week?
How much can you save by cutting on your bottled water purchase?
How can you help reduce the pile of plastic garbage that harm our environment and our society as well?
Reduce, reuse, recycle and start using safe plastic drinking water bottles.
Resources:
www. Treehugger.com
www. Ecoplum.com
www. Mindfully.org
www. container-recycling.org
storyofstuff.org
Photo thanks to http:// www. flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/
