We should also think twice before we buy that. There is a beauty in the reduce, reuse, recycle motto. Reduce your consumption of materials. Reuse it if you do buy it. Recycle it if you don't have any other use for it. I like to turn my glass jars into planters for my variety of plants life I have at home.
Check out the lifespan of the basic materials we use and buy everyday;
Glass: 1 million year!
Plastic beverage bottles: 450-1000 years
Plastic bag: 500 years to forever!
Disposable diapers: 250-500 years
Aluminum can: 200-500 years
Styrofoam cup: 500 years to forever! (Meaning, it essentially does not biodegrade.)
Tin can: 50-100 years
Leather: 50 years
Nylon fabric: 30-40 years
This should give you a sense of how long your "trash" will live in that landfill it will go to. Our landfills are already over capacity so, let be more conscious of what we buy. Try reusing them when the initial use is done.
Ditch the Bottle
PRIVITIZES WATER
Purchasing water contributes to the privatization of water, meaning, it gives corporations permission to bottle up a natural resource (which is provided by the earth free of charge) and sell it back to us for 500x's the price of tap water. Water is a commons, meaning it is for everyone and does not belong to one entity entirely.
ENVIRONMENT
Plastic is made from petroleum and we all know how horrible oil extraction is on the environment.
Also, only 20% of bottled water is recycled meaning that the remaining 80% end up in our overfilled landfills or in the ocean
Americans used about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year. However, the U.S.'s recycling rate for plastic is only 23 percent, which means 38 billion water bottles – more than $1 billion worth of plastic – are wasted each year.
HEALTH
People like to believe that bottled water is more healthy than your local tap water. This is far from he truth. In actuality, tap water is literally 500 x's more regulated than bottled water. Tap water goes through strenuous regulations set by the government while bottled water is usually only tested once by the company and not the government. Also, most of the bottled water on the market today is just purified tap water anyway so it is coming from the same source your tap water is coming from.
“There is no reason to believe that bottled water is safer than tap water.”-Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council
Then there is the fact that it is stored in a plastic bottle which is made from petroleum. The chemicals from the plastic bottle can seep into your bottled water when left in hot temperatures such as a hot car in the summer.
MONEY You save money when you ditch the bottle. Bottled water is sold at 500x's the amount of tap water. A case of bottled water every week can get pretty pricey when you add it all up in the course of a year. The recommended eight glasses of water a day, at U.S. tap rates equals about $.49 per year; that same amount of bottled water is about $1,400.
To put it into perspective;
Multiply that by 2 cases a month = $12
Multiply that by 12 months in a year = $144/year
On water that you can get through your filtered tap water.
VS
A water filter pitcher(lasts for years = $22
Plus a $5 water bottle = $27
This will last you for YEARS.
Instead, purchase a reusable water bottle and a water filter (a jug or a filter that attaches to your sink is cool).
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