I found this article online and it has changed the way I drink water. Bottles, Bottles, Everywhere by Ramon Cruz has opened my eyes to what damage can be done by simply drinking from the plastic water bottle on my desk. Like every health conscientious American, I make a effort to consume eight glasses of water a day. In doing this, I tend to drink a lot out of water bottles. But the harm that I’m doing to the environment could be comparable to the harm I would be doing to my own body if I didn’t consume that water. A person needs to drink water throughout the day in order for their body to work properly; your blood has to carry oxygen to your cells and needs water to do this. Water also helps you digest food and get ride of waste in your body. But by drinking water out of plastic bottles, I am overflowing our landfills and contributing to global warming. Sure recycling would help, but “less than 20 percent of the 28 billion single-serving water bottles that Americans buy each year are recycled.”[1] Therefore, most of those water bottles are resting in landfills where it takes thousands of years for the plastic to decompose.
And what for? “More than a quarter of all bottled water is just processed tap water, including Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani.1” Yet bottled water consumption is continually growing each year. So there needs to be a better plan of action to tackle this wide-spread damage! The article suggests several options. One being if you purchase bottled water make sure you recycle the container. I know this option isn’t the easiest for me because the community I live in does not collect recycling (which I plan on discussing with them in the near future). So the second suggestion is what I’m doing now. I drink tap water. I have a water filter at my home and at the office where I consume my water daily. And since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for tap water are more stringent than the Food & Drug Administration’s standards for bottled water, I’m drinking water that is just as safe as, if not safer than, bottled. I also drink out of a reusable container so I won’t be throwing away numerous plastic or Styrofoam cups a week–which also harms the environment. Be sure you don’t reuse single-use water bottles; doing so can expose you to bacterial build-up and carcinogens leached from the plastic.
The ‘Green Living’ bandwagon is continually getting new members and I encourage all of you to hop aboard and do your part in helping our environment!
[1] http://green.yahoo.com/blog/climate411/91/bottles-bottles-everywhere.html
Tags: apartment living, blog, consumers, cup, day, drink, environment, environmentally friendly, food, going green, having, health, help, plastic, water
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Apartments Going Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:09 am
great to see a fellow both health and environment conscious. I have a filtration setup back home. works on reverse osmosis and ozonolysis principles. water tastes great really. and the dilemma of using plastics and styrofoam is solved.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
My wife and I were going through two cases of plastic bottled water a week but now we’ve switched to filtered tap water via a countertop Brita water filtration pitcher. We’ve always recyled, but trying to do more for “green living”.