People need to drink 8 to 13 glasses of water a day. But if we get that water from plastic water bottles we have a big problem. Americans throw away 50 million plastic water bottles a day that ARE NOT recycled. That’s nearly 20 BILLION bottles a year – and that’s only one in six Americans throwing out one bottle a day each.
That’s a problem.
I refill water bottles many times. Some people have durable reusable bottles. In our office we have a filtered water machine and our employees are welcome to fill all the bottles they want. Avoid them, reuse them, or at the very least recycle them everytime. (The same for any beverage container.)
Remember the days when there was no bottled water?
Thanks for this post. It’s important that we all consider this and make good choices. Tap water in most places is perfectly fine. While some bottled water, especially if the bottled-on date is older than 3 months, can have bacteria (my brother works for the EPA).
Everyday we need to think about the choices we make to minimize our waste. This goes from how many napkins we use to the light that we leave on. Being conscious about this at all times can make a difference. If we all did, the effects would be impacting.
Great reminder,example and question.
A bit of a contrary opinion, but recycling isn’t the long term solution, it’s just a short term stop-gap. The long term solution is the reclamation of landfills and the ability to process the unsorted output of the waste management trucks. In fact, I think recycling hurts the long term solution by reducing the amount the high value materials in the landfills and trucks. We absolutely should deal with our waste problems, but the long term good solution is an entrepreneurial opportunity that is being undercut by the current “panic/crisis” approach of preaching recycling everywhere at all times. And not only are we not running out of landfill space, but lots of the recycled materials we so painstakingly sort out go straight to the landfill anyway. This means we could reduce our recycling behavior without reducing the benefits we get from recycling, and adding more recycling behavior doesn’t increase our benefit. I’d encourage everyone to focus on the long term solutions to actually make a difference.