Water Bottles – Proving a Point

Just a quick post before I board my plane home for the holidays! Of course, expect to see some Thanksgiving sustainability tips to be posted soon.

But on to my main point. For the month before I went completely water bottle free, I kept a bin in my room and put in it every water bottle that I finished while I was in there.

Before I go on to make my point, I want to show you what this looks like, because pictures really are worth a thousand words:

Think that’s a problem? Let me clarify something that will make you realize how much of a problem this really is. Those, like I said, we’re only the bottles that made it to my room. Add in all of the bottles used and recycled on the go, and this is so much worse than it was at first glance.

Still don’t understand the problem? Fortunately for us, all my bottles get recycled. But imagine what happens to the bottles from the majority of the population who doesn’t recycle every bottle, or worse, at all, this creates a lot of waste to fill up our nation’s landfills.

Except it doesn’t end there. According to national statistics, of the 28% of water bottles that actually get recycled, 40% get remade into non-recyclable materials. So from all of these bottles that we produce each year, all of which can be recycled, only 11.2% of them get fully recycled into newly recyclable materials.

If you don’t see the problem now, I don’t know how else to prove it to you.

That’s all for now!