Water Some Easy Ways to be Green?
April 17th, 2008 at 10:30 pm (Uncategorized)
Make a decision to give up bottled water. It’s soo simple, and there are many reasons why it’s an important thing to do. Here are just a few of them to give you a little incentive:
1. Keeps the green in your wallet
Drinking bottled water costs more than it does to put gas in your car (by up to five times). It doesn’t make sense to waste money on this when over 25% of bottled water is tap water, and1/3 of bottled water is more contaminated than tap water! (NRDC tests) In 2006, Americans spent $11 Billion on bottled water - money which goes straight to landfill and pollution.
2. All those bottles create enormous amounts of landfill
The photo above by Chris Jordan represents the amount of bottles used by Americans every 5 minutes! That’s 2 million bottles . Each person uses 166 plastic water bottles per year. If you try to imagine how much soil space your annual bottle contribution takes up, you might decide to quit the plastic.
3. Those bottles create fossil fuels and utilize precious resources to produce and transport
A bottle of water from Fiji took about 7 times as much water to produce it as is actually in it, a quarter gallon of fossil fuels, and emits over a pound of greenhouse gases!! 1.5 million barrels of oil are used to produce the plastic for our annual bottled water use. Uh, yeah.. sounds kinda counterproductive.
4. Most importantly - leaching of chemicals from plastics can be harmful to your health
It is genuinely accepted (yet somewhat still a ‘controversy’ in the United States) that hard plastic water bottles such as the older Nalgene containers and other sports bottles made of Polycarbonate (labeled plastic #7) leach Bisphenol A (BPA) into the water, which is a chemical that mimics estrogen and interrupts natural hormone systems. This is especially harmful to children and infants (who use hard plastic baby bottles), and effects heighten after reuse and when bottles are left in the sun. There is also some controversy surrounding the reuse of PET (#1) plastic water bottles, although some claims are unsupported. As a general rule, if the bottle was left in the sun think of it as microwaving your water in toxic plastics - especially when the water tastes a little different, the plastic has grown cloudy in appearance, and you can smell the plastic.
Some good articles:
Thank goodness we’re giving you FREE water at Lightning In A Bottle to fill up your reusable container (if you don’t bring one, you can purchase an LIB Klean Kanteen - discounted with a Green Ticket upgrade).
Take the pledge to swear off plastic water bottles, and use your purchasing power to vote against this nonsense consumerist habit that’s causing pollution and taking up precious natural resources and land space.
