“You can’t get via a single day with out possessing an influence on the world close to you. What you do can make a big difference, and you have to determine what variety of distinction you want to make.”
– Jane Goodall
Seeking for an environmentally pleasant notion to faucet into? Here is water bottle : ditch the plastic h2o bottles and begin getting your aqua at house.
An believed 88% of plastic h2o bottles are NOT recycled in Canada – a quantity which is as uncomfortable as it is staggering.
With every Canadian consuming sixty 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 The united states, it utilised to be that about 70 million plastic drinking water bottles finished up in landfills every year.
These days, in the US on your own, People in america use an approximated fifty BILLION plastic h2o bottles in a 12 months – and forty billion of those ended up in landfills.
Holy batman… that is a Whole lot of plastic drinking water bottles!
Throughout the world, shut to two.5 billion kilograms of plastic are used to bottle h2o every year. And this plastic can just take as prolonged as one,000 many years to biodegrade. In the procedure, toxic additives are leaching into the groundwater.
As for the amount of oil necessary to produce explained plastic? It will take seventeen million barrels of oil each calendar year to make h2o bottles for the US market. That is the equivalent of fueling 1 million automobiles for a yr.
But hold out, there is far more…
Footprint goes beyond the plastic
Not like the water you get by way of your faucet at house, bottled drinking water has a bigger environmental footprint because it has to be transported over prolonged distances. Alternatively of simply currently being piped into your glass in the kitchen, it arrives by truck, practice, aircraft, and boat. And all these modes of transport need fossil fuels to get about.
And many bottled h2o brand names really use filtered faucet water comparable to the water you get at residence anyway. In addition, household tap drinking water is typically a lot more strictly tested and controlled than bottled drinking water, so it makes tiny sense to buy one thing that is so abundant and low cost at property.
Feel of the funds you will help save
“Buying h2o in plastic bottles just does not make sense economically,” describes the Pays to Reside Eco-friendly website. “It can expense you as a lot as 2400 times as considerably to get your drinking water in a one-time use bottle as opposed to receiving it from the faucet. The typical bottle of h2o will cost you on typical of $.seventy nine in comparison to just 1/three of a cent from your faucet.”
This is what you can do to reduce the affect of plastic h2o bottles:
1. End buying bottled water – or probably begin by purchasing much less
two. Recycle any disposable plastic h2o bottles you do use – compared to throwing them in the rubbish
three. Obtain a reusable water bottle and use it at perform, on the road, in the fitness center, etc.
Having these steps will assist to maintain a lot more water in which it must be – outside the house of a bottle. It will minimize down on pointless squander in landfills by reducing some of the hundreds of thousands of plastic drinking water bottles dumped every day.
So let us ease up on automatically hitting the bottle and search for what is on faucet as an alternative.
Personally, I am a Huge drinking water drinker. I consume at minimum two litres of drinking water a working day. So you’ll hardly ever see me out and about with one particular of my two trusty Nalgene water bottles in tow. But on situation, if I forget my drinking water bottle or I operate out of drinking water (and there is certainly no area to refill it) then I will buy a disposable bottle of drinking water. But I certain will not like to.