We have hit our two-week mark and are very happy with the progress we are making with our Green Year. For today, we have decided to rid ourselves of bottled water. Why have we chosen to do this for our fifteenth day? Well, bottled water is a huge environmental problem for the world right now, yet people prefer to have bottled water instead of tap water. Thirty years ago if you told people we would buy bottled water, they would call you nuts, now it is the norm. So, what does bottled water do to our environment?Every single year, 1.5 million tons of plastic is used to bottle 89 billion liters of water. This is an immense amount. This amounts to the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls over the course of two entire days. When you have seen Niagara Falls and the 500,000 liters of water that flow over it every second, you realize just how much water that is.
In the United States, the Earth Policy Institute has estimated that the process to make the plastic for water bottles, burns 1.5 million barrels of oil, which could power 100,000 cars for a year. This is made even worse when you realize that 90 percent of the plastic bottles are not recycled, and sit in landfills where they will slowly decay for centuries.
Instead of using bottled water over and over again, you can simply have one bottle that you clean out, which you fill with water when you need it. There is no reason to have so many water bottles being thrown out over the course of a year, it is the utmost in waste and a huge problem for the environment.
No more water bottles will be entering this house.
