Two easy things to do to care for the environment.
Give up plastic straws. Americans use over 500 million plastic straws every day! Most plastic straws are too lightweight to make it through the mechanical recycling sorter. They drop through sorting screens and mix with other materials and are too small to separate, contaminating recycling loads or getting disposed as garbage. Straws left on beaches (straws in the ten top items found on beaches in beach clean-ups) and blown out of trashcans end up in the ocean. At the current rate of use, by 2050, more plastic straws than fish will be in the world’s oceans. https://www.strawlessocean.org/faq/
Give up plastic water bottles. Americans buy 29 billion water bottles a year. For every six bottles people buy, only one is recycled. That leads to a big problem given the fact that water bottles do not biodegrade, but rather photodegrade. This means that it takes at least up to 1,000 years for every single bottle to decompose, leaking pollutants into our soil and water along the way. Yuck!
As a result, U.S. landfills are overflowing with 2 million tons of discarded water bottles. And because plastics are produced with fossil fuels, not only does that make them an environmental hazard, but also an enormous waste of valuable resources.
- It takes 3 times the amount of water in a bottle of water to make it as it does to fill it.
- giant amounts of fossil fuels to make and transport.
- The production of bottled water uses 17 million barrels of oil a year. That’s slightly more than it would take to fill one million cars a year with fuel.
- It takes almost 2,000 times the energy to manufacture a bottle of water than it does to produce tap water.
- If you fill a plastic water bottle so it is about 25% full, that’s about how much oil it took to make the bottle.
Here are some things you can do to help end the prolific use of water bottles and the waste and pollution they cause.
- Ditch the habit: Make sure to stock your home with plenty of reusable stainless steel water bottles that will improve the environment and your health.
- Purchase a water filter: Purchase a water filter to keep in your refrigerator and use it every morning to refill your reusable water bottles for the day.
- Raise awareness: Tell your friends and family about the impact bottled water is having on our environment. Encourage your workplace to ban plastic water bottles, and educate your children about the positive impact they have on the environment when they use reusable stainless steel bottles.
- Find alternatives: It’s not just plastic water bottles that are causing environmental harm. Try to find household items, such as soap and cleaning supplies that are in environmentally-friendly packaging.
- Recycle: When you do use a plastic bottle, make sure that you recycle it. When you see an empty, used water bottle sitting on the street or in a park, pick it up and recycle it.
- Use water fountains: Ask your local representative if your county can install more water fountains so people in your community can refill reusable bottles more easily.
http://waterbottles.healthyhumanlife.com/plastic-water-bottle-pollution-plastic-bottles-end/