{"id":6004,"date":"2018-01-04T15:21:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T10:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6004"},"modified":"2018-01-04T15:21:08","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T10:21:08","slug":"an-ode-to-the-reusable-water-bottle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6004","title":{"rendered":"An ode to the reusable water bottle"},"content":{"rendered":"

A discussion on the damages of disposable water bottles and why you should get something reusable.<\/em><\/p>\n

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In 2010 I bought my first reusable water bottle.<\/p>\n

It was big, metal and red from a Walgreens in Chicago for about six dollars, (not including taxes). I didn\u2019t do it to save the planet, and it wasn\u2019t to reduce waste. I hadn\u2019t suddenly grown a conscience and decided to stop using plastic for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

It was convenience.<\/p>\n

Lollapalooza was that weekend, and to my surprise they weren\u2019t selling water anywhere in the festival. Instead, they had water bottle refilling stations everywhere. The concept was completely foreign to me. I hadn\u2019t really thought much about reusable bottles before, but after three days of music and free water I was a convert. I brought it home and the tradition continued. In one week I said goodbye to Poland Spring, my favorite brand, and said hello to the reusable world. \u00a0<\/p>\n

It became a staple of my life.\u00a0Five years later, I feel naked without it. I don\u2019t leave the house without refilling it. My hand feels light without it dangling from my fingertips. It\u2019s still the convenience of having it with me, of not having to buy water, but that\u2019s been overshadowed by something larger.<\/p>\n

By my estimation, conservatively, I\u2019ve saved over 800 plastic water bottles in the past five years. That doesn\u2019t sound like much, but if just one percent of Americans made the switch to reusable water bottles, we could eliminate roughly 500 million water bottles annually from winding up in our landfills, oceans, and on the sides of our roads. We\u2019re drowning in plastic. \u00a0And that\u2019s not the only problem.<\/p>\n

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch\u00a0stretches from the West Coast of California to the Eastern Coast of Japan. Millions of tons of plastic, held together by ocean currents and cumulative\u00a0weight, stretches across the largest ocean in the world. And it\u2019s getting bigger every day.<\/p>\n

What a waste.<\/p>\n

It takes\u00a017 million barrels of oil\u00a0to produce plastic water bottles for Americans annually. That could fuel 1.3 million cars for a year, that could power 190,000 homes.<\/p>\n

Instead? \u00a0It became over 50 billion plastic water bottles.\u00a0According to Terrie-Ann Johnson, CEO of Clean Up Australia, \u201cThat\u2019s a really poor use of a finite resource.\u201d<\/p>\n

American\u2019s recycling rate of water bottles was at 23 percent in 2007, meaning that of those 50 billion containers, 38 billion ended up not being recycled. That\u2019s over $1 billion of plastic wasted every year.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s indicative of a polarized global society. There are those who have and those who have not.\u00a0750 million people\u00a0lack access to clean water, and over 850,000 die every year due to a water related illness. One in three, roughly\u00a02.5 billion people, don\u2019t have access to proper sanitation methods. All of these factors combined lead to extreme poverty that most of Americans cannot relate to, and out of all of this waste, the disposable plastic water bottle is the most familiar, and the biggest affront.<\/p>\n

It begs the question: How many scary facts do we need to print before we realize that it\u2019s time to move away from disposable plastic water bottles?<\/p>\n

Disposable water bottles make up roughly one third of all litter in US national parks. So,\u00a0since 2011 over twenty national parks\u00a0including the Grand Canyon introduced a ban on the bottles in an effort to reduce waste and promote sustainability. The national parks went further by introducing a bill to Congress that would ban all disposable plastic water bottles in National Parks. This has been met with fierce resistance from over 200 producers of bottled water, dubbed \u2018Big Water\u2019 by media outlets.<\/p>\n

Keith Rothfus, a congressional representative from Pennsylvania,\u00a0has taken the legal reins\u00a0in the fight against the water bottle ban, with the defense that some families will suffer from dehydration due to the new restrictions. This argument is fairly transparent, as the several water bottling plants located in Pennsylvania bring in an annual $6.6 billion a year to the state\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that it\u2019s impossible for places to ban the plastic water bottle. On July 8, 2009 the small town of Bundanoon, Australia outlawed the sale of bottled water almost unanimously. The same day Nathan Rees, the New South Wales State premier also\u00a0banned all state departments and agencies\u00a0from purchasing bottled water.<\/p>\n

The epidemic isn\u2019t going to end overnight, but maybe, just maybe, we can start with just one water bottle at a time. May I suggest going out and getting a metal water bottle for yourself. You won\u2019t regret it.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.globalcitizen.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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