“You cannot get by means of a single day with no obtaining an influence on the globe around you. What you do makes a distinction, and you have to make a decision what sort of distinction you want to make.”
– Jane Goodall
Searching for an environmentally friendly concept to tap into? Here’s one particular: ditch the plastic water bottles and get started obtaining your aqua at home.
An estimated 88% of plastic water bottles are NOT recycled in Canada – a quantity that’s as embarrassing as it is staggering.
With each 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 and every year.
Currently, 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 utilised to bottle water every single year. And this plastic can take as long as 1,000 years to biodegrade. In the procedure, toxic additives are leaching into the groundwater.
As for the quantity of oil expected to produce stated plastic? It requires 17 million barrels of oil each year to make water bottles for the US marketplace. That is the equivalent of fueling 1 million vehicles for a year.
But wait, there is additional…
Footprint goes beyond the plastic
As opposed to the water you get through your tap at residence, bottled water has a bigger environmental footprint since it has to be transported over long distances. Alternatively of merely becoming 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 25oz stainless steel water bottle of bottled water brands truly use filtered tap water comparable to the water you get at house anyway. Plus, residential tap water is generally additional strictly tested and regulated than bottled water, so it tends to make tiny sense to purchase some thing that is so plentiful and low cost at household.
Assume of the dollars you will save
“Obtaining water in plastic bottles just does not make sense financially,” explains the Pays to Live Green web-site. “It can expense you as much as 2400 occasions as considerably to get your water in a 1-time use bottle as opposed to finding it from the tap. The typical bottle of water will expense you on average of $.79 compared to just 1/3 of a cent from your faucet.”
Here’s what you can do to lessen the influence of plastic water bottles:
1. Cease purchasing bottled water – or perhaps get started by shopping for significantly less
2. Recycle any disposable plastic water bottles you do use – versus throwing them in the garbage
3. Buy a reusable water bottle and use it at work, on the road, in the fitness center, etc.
Taking these steps will assistance to keep more water exactly where it need to 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 day-to-day.
So let’s ease up on automatically hitting the bottle and appear for what’s on tap alternatively.
Personally, I am a Enormous water drinker. I drink at least 2 litres of water a day. So you are going to hardly ever see me out and about with a single of my two trusty Nalgene water bottles in tow. But on occasion, if I overlook my water bottle or I run out of water (and there’s no spot to refill it) then I will get a disposable bottle of water. But I confident never like to.
