“You cannot get by way of a single day devoid of getting an effect on the planet about you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what sort of distinction you want to make.”
Looking for an environmentally friendly idea to tap into? Here’s 1: ditch the plastic water bottles and start out obtaining your aqua at property.
An estimated 88% of plastic water bottles are NOT recycled in Canada – a quantity that’s 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 utilised to be that about 70 million plastic water bottles ended up in landfills each and every year.
Nowadays, 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.five billion kilograms of plastic are employed to bottle water every 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 quantity of oil essential to generate said plastic? It requires 17 million barrels of oil every year to make water bottles for the US industry. That is the equivalent of fueling 1 million vehicles for a year.
But wait, there’s far more…
Footprint goes beyond the plastic
As opposed to the water you get through your tap at house, bottled water has a larger environmental footprint because it has to be transported over long distances. Instead of simply becoming piped into your glass in the kitchen, it arrives by truck, train, plane, and boat. And all these modes of transport need fossil fuels to get around.
And several bottled water brands essentially use filtered tap water similar to the water you get at dwelling anyway. Plus, residential tap water is generally additional strictly tested and regulated than bottled water, so it tends to make tiny sense to invest in one thing that is so plentiful and low cost at household.
Think of the dollars you are going to save
“Shopping for water in plastic bottles just does not make sense financially,” explains the Pays to Live Green website. “It can price you as much as 2400 occasions as substantially to get your water in a one-time use bottle as opposed to acquiring it from the tap. The typical bottle of water will price you on average of $.79 compared to just 1/three of a cent from your faucet.”
Here’s what you can do to reduce the impact of plastic water bottles:
1. Stop purchasing bottled water – or possibly start by purchasing significantly less
two. 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, and so forth.
Taking these measures will assist to preserve additional water exactly where it must be – outdoors of a bottle. It will reduce down on unnecessary waste in landfills by lowering some of the millions of plastic water bottles dumped every day.
So let’s ease up on automatically hitting the bottle and look for what is on tap rather.
Personally, I am a Big 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 1 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 spot to refill it) then I will obtain a disposable bottle of water. But I certain don’t like to.