Green December Day 18 - Water bottles

I’ve stopped… Buying bottled water.

This one has been said time after time but purchasing a reusable water bottle cuts out a lot of excess plastic waste. I got mine from MEC and added my own little touch with my stickers available for purchase on this site! I also have a tendency to spill everywhere I go, so I also got the Easy Sipper insert for Nalgenes.

Purchasing a Brita filter is an easy solution if you think that tap water contains too many chemicals and Terracycle offers a free recycling program for your filters.

If you are one of those plastic bottle purchasers, the least you can do is leave the lids on when recycling them! Many people don’t know this, but the lids of bottled items tend to get sifted through the sorting facilities that are intended to sift out broken glass. The one exception to removing the lids is metal lids of jars, which need to be picked up via a magnet and recycled separately.

Why

In Ontario alone, one billion water bottles are sent to landfill every year. A large proportion of plastic bottles may end up in oceans where they will slowly breakdown into smaller and smaller pieces contributing to the microplastic issue. One fact that is astonishing is that it takes three times more water to create a water bottle than it does to fill it. These are just a few facts that highlight the negative outcomes of supporting the bottled water industry.

Additionally, we are lucky enough Canadians to have access to fresh, clean water that comes from our taps and there is quite a bit of controversy on how companies are using the convenience factor to get leverage on these essential resources that are so limited in other countries.

I encourage you to do your own research on all the reasons why bottled water should not be supported but at very least keep the lids on them when you’re done with it.