“You can’t get by way of a single day with no getting an influence on the globe about you. What you do tends to make a difference, and you have to choose what sort of distinction you want to make.”
– Jane Goodall
Looking for an environmentally friendly thought to tap into? Here’s one: ditch the plastic water bottles and start off acquiring your aqua at home.
Water bottle estimated 88% of plastic water bottles are NOT recycled in Canada – a number that is as embarrassing as it is staggering.
With 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 utilized to be that about 70 million plastic water bottles ended up in landfills every year.
Currently, in the US alone, Americans use an estimated 50 BILLION plastic water bottles in a year – and 40 billion of these ended up in landfills.
Holy batman… that is a LOT of plastic water bottles!
Across the globe, close to 2.five billion kilograms of plastic are made use of to bottle water each year. And this plastic can take as long as 1,000 years to biodegrade. In the process, toxic additives are leaching into the groundwater.
As for the quantity of oil required to create said plastic? It requires 17 million barrels of oil each year to make water bottles for the US industry. That is the equivalent of fueling 1 million cars for a year.
But wait, there is additional…
Footprint goes beyond the plastic
As opposed to the water you get by means of your tap at property, bottled water has a larger environmental footprint for the reason that it has to be transported over lengthy distances. As an alternative of just becoming piped into your glass in the kitchen, it arrives by truck, train, plane, and boat. And all these modes of transport demand fossil fuels to get around.
And many bottled water brands in fact use filtered tap water comparable to the water you get at household anyway. Plus, residential tap water is commonly much more strictly tested and regulated than bottled water, so it makes small sense to get something that is so plentiful and cheap at residence.
Assume of the revenue you will save
“Buying water in plastic bottles just does not make sense financially,” explains the Pays to Reside Green web site. “It can cost you as a lot as 2400 occasions as much to get your water in a one-time use bottle as opposed to receiving it from the tap. The typical 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 decrease the impact of plastic water bottles:
1. Cease acquiring bottled water – or maybe start off by purchasing significantly less
2. Recycle any disposable plastic water bottles you do use – versus throwing them in the garbage
three. Buy a reusable water bottle and use it at operate, on the road, in the health club, etc.
Taking these methods will assist to preserve additional water where it must be – outdoors of a bottle. It will reduce down on unnecessary waste in landfills by reducing 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 rather.
Personally, I am a Massive water drinker. I drink at least two litres of water a day. So you are going to rarely see me out and about with one 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 is no location to refill it) then I will invest in a disposable bottle of water. But I certain never like to.