Kicking the Bottle Habit
Over the past few years I have been trying to make the switch to reusable water bottles. I always knew that the plastic created tons of waste in landfills that could take hundreds of years to decompose. However I never made a committed switch to reusable bottles because it was inconvenient to refill a bottle when I was in a rush and I always figured I could recycle the plastic bottles. In reality most plastic water bottles aren’t recycled to make new ones, they are just melted down to make other cheap plastic products. In order to send less waste to lands fills and reduce the amount of plastic to sit and avoid decomposition… I will be cutting out plastic bottles. This has always been a goal of mine and I truly want to make this change a permanent one that will last far past the end of this semester.
Another motivation factor in my mission is that plastic bottles don’t just create waste in landfills. So much energy is used in the making and transporting of plastic bottles. Think about it. Oil has to be extracted to make the plastic, used to run the factories where the bottles are made and has to be pumped into the trucks that transport the bottles to locations worldwide. Just think about how much oil must be used to make one 24 pack of water bottles! And those 24 water bottles are going to continue to sit in landfills until long after I leave this Earth. It actually scares me that something that I use for maybe 5 minutes will out live me by hundreds of years.
It will take some getting used to to make extra time to fill my Brita before filling my nalgene or avoiding a plastic bottle in lower when I’m rushing to find time to eat. However the extra trips down the hall way to the kitchen sink for my Brita and the dedication to finding a water fountain with a bottle faucet will prove to be the better choice when I look at the big picture. I’m excited to see where this behavioral change will take me this semester and the impact it will have on my life long term.
For a better look into the production and market strategies surrounding bottled water, check the video below!
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