“You cannot get via a single day devoid of getting an influence on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to choose what type of difference you want to make.”
– Jane Goodall
Hunting for an environmentally friendly concept to tap into? Here’s one: ditch the plastic water bottles and start off having your aqua at house.
An estimated 88% of plastic water bottles are NOT recycled in Canada – a number that’s as embarrassing as it is staggering.
With each and every Canadian consuming 60 litres of bottled water a year – and sales surpassing coffee, tea, and milk – this is a lot of plastic needlessly piling up in landfills.
In North America, it applied to be that about 70 million plastic water bottles ended up in landfills each year.
These days, in the US alone, Americans use an estimated 50 BILLION plastic water bottles in a year – and 40 billion of those ended up in landfills.
Holy batman… that is a LOT of plastic water bottles!
Across the globe, close to 2.5 billion kilograms of plastic are made use of to bottle water every single year. And this plastic can take as extended as 1,000 years to biodegrade. In the course of action, toxic additives are leaching into the groundwater.
As for the amount of oil necessary to make said plastic? It requires 17 million barrels of oil each and every year to make water bottles for the US market. That is the equivalent of fueling 1 million cars for a year.
But wait, there’ Open ended water bottle …
Footprint goes beyond the plastic
In contrast to the water you get through your tap at home, bottled water has a bigger environmental footprint mainly because it has to be transported more than lengthy distances. Rather of simply being piped into your glass in the kitchen, it arrives by truck, train, plane, and boat. And all these modes of transport call for fossil fuels to get around.
And many bottled water brands basically use filtered tap water related to the water you get at household anyway. Plus, residential tap water is normally a lot more strictly tested and regulated than bottled water, so it tends to make tiny sense to get a thing that is so plentiful and cheap at residence.
Consider of the money you’ll save
“Getting water in plastic bottles just does not make sense financially,” explains the Pays to Live Green web site. “It can price you as considerably as 2400 times as considerably to get your water in a one-time use bottle as opposed to obtaining it from the tap. The average bottle of water will cost you on average of $.79 compared to just 1/3 of a cent from your faucet.”
Here’s what you can do to reduce the influence of plastic water bottles:
1. Quit purchasing bottled water – or maybe begin by acquiring significantly less
two. Recycle any disposable plastic water bottles you do use – versus throwing them in the garbage
three. Purchase a reusable water bottle and use it at function, on the road, in the fitness center, and so on.
Taking these steps will support to retain a lot more water exactly where it really should be – outdoors of a bottle. It will reduce down on unnecessary waste in landfills by decreasing some of the millions of plastic water bottles dumped everyday.
So let’s ease up on automatically hitting the bottle and appear for what is on tap instead.
Personally, I am a Big water drinker. I drink at least two litres of water a day. So you are going to seldom see me out and about with one particular of my two trusty Nalgene water bottles in tow. But on occasion, if I forget my water bottle or I run out of water (and there’s no place to refill it) then I will get a disposable bottle of water. But I sure don’t like to.