The Plastic Water Bottle Effect

Before you grab your next bottle of drinking water, consider the plastic bottle it comes in. How was the bottle produced and transported?  What is it made of?  And, more importantly, what happens to it once it becomes empty?

How It Was Produced/What It Is Made Of

Bottled water comes in a variety of colorful bottles with good looking labels. Surely the benefits of the drinking water must be greatly increased by the magical waters contained in bottles with scenes of mountains, forests, or heavenly looking plains; yet, one in four contains nothing more than tap water. There are no regulations forcing companies to disclose the waters source on the label.

The bottles themselves are made up of several different plastics; some, such as polycarbonate bottles, of which may be harmful to the person or animal drinking the water. Polycarbonates contain BPA, which has been linked to breast cancer, birth defects, neurological difficulties and many, many more disorders. Hard as it may be to believe, single use plastic bottles are actually rarely disposed of correctly. Only one in six bottles plastic bottles are recycled in the U.S.  These bottles wind up in landfills adding to a country’s waste.

Our Animals

1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die from entanglement and ingestion of plastic bottles. 119 bottle caps were found in the stomach of an albatross found dead in Hawaii. The harm these bottles cause to our animals cannot be exaggerated.

Alternative Water

One of the ways you can cut the amount of bottles you send to the landfill and protect yourself from the harmful chemicals that plastic bottles are often made of is to find alternatives to your reliance on plastic bottled water. Find one of the glass drinking bottles with reinforced sides that are sold in your area and fill it from the tap or a filtered water pitcher.  Using one filter, in a filtered pitcher system, replaces 300 plastic water bottles.

Transportation: It Makes No Sense

37,800 18-wheel trucks are on the road delivering water in the United States, each week! Not only do they add significantly to our highway congestion, it is a waste of gasoline and pours pollutants into our environment.

And that’s not all! It makes no sense to bottle and transport water when we already have good clean water available at a low price. It takes more water to produce and transport water then the amount being transported, 6.74 gallons of water to produce only equals 1 liter of bottled water.

What Happens to It Once It’s Empty

If you do choose to continue using plastic bottles, recycle them. Recycling one bottle will save enough energy to light a 68 watt light bulb for six hours! Plus, keeping the bottles out of the landfill will help your area maintain its own rapidly overflowing landfill area.

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