Plastic Water Bottles

There has been a lot of talk about plastic in the environment lately, especially plastic water bottles.

I recently saw a documentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Network about plastic recycling in Canada. I believe this story could apply to the US and probably other western countries as well.

Recycling is big business. There are only a handful of waste management companies that are recyclers. But do we know how they are recycling the plastic that we use and toss away?

I know you've seen the ads showing how plastic bottles become park benches or playground equipment or some other use that seems to be civic-minded.  But have you ever thought about how much plastic waste we produce? How much gets recycled? 

Plastic water bottles are a creation of the wealthy elite. These people travel the world and don't trust the water sources in the countries that they visit. When you go to a country where the locals won't drink their own tap water you might want to think about drinking Perrier bottled water. But her in the US that is not the case (Flint Michigan may be an extreme exception). Most of our public water systems produce good clean water. As a matter of fact, many of the bottled waters that are sold are sourced from city water systems. The company gets the water for free and bottles it to sell to you for a big profit. Check the label on your plastic bottle. Some companies may treat the water again by reverse osmosis or add minerals, but most of it is just tap water in a plastic bottle.

Those companies are not using recycled plastic to produce their bottles. So every bottle of water produced just adds to the plastic waste.

That plastic wasted is not going into park benches. Most of it winds up in landfills where it never bio-degrades. Or it winds up floating into the sewer systems, into our streams and out to the ocean. 

Most of our plastic gets shipped overseas to places like Malaysia, Cambodia or Viet Nam where it is "recycled". The truth is that it just winds up in their landfills too. Waste management companies pay them for accepting our waste because we in the west don't really have a complete recycling industry. 

The Three Rs of conservation stand for Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. We aren't reducing our use of plastics. A small minority has reusable cups or bottles, but these eventually get tossed into the trash too. Recycling is at best a myth when it comes to plastics. Aluminum cans get recycled, glass bottles get recycled, cars get recycled even oil gets recycled. But plastic, for the most part, does not get recycled. If you have ever gone to a private recycling center to take your cans to get a few bucks, I can almost guarantee that the place didn't offer cash to recycle plastic bottles. They probably wouldn't even take them. I'll admit that there are a few states that require a deposit for bottles. But what good does it do if you are in Alabama and you have a bottle that says "5 cent refund in Michigan and Hawaii?

We used to get all of our drinks in glass bottles until someone convinced the bottling industry that plastic is cheaper to make and because of the weight it's cheaper to ship. That might be true initially but not when it comes to recycling. People still collect Coke bottles that were used back in the '40s. If a glass bottle doesn't get recycled it will eventually break down into the sand that it originated from. Sand doesn't pollute. In fact, sand is used to filter the water that goes into plastic bottles. Collecting glass bottles for decades was an industry to itself. Kids like me used to pick up bottles everywhere to go cash them in for the two-cent deposit refund. Homeless people cashed in bottles to get food to eat. Milk came in a glass bottle too instead of a plastic-lined cardboard. Once you drank the milk you would leave the bottle on your porch so that the milkman could pick it up. The bottle was sterilized and reused hundreds of times. 

I believe the public has been led down a false path with plastic water bottles. The industry has convinced us that if we don't constantly sip on our water bottles will dehydrate and die. Most of my life I only drank water when I was thirsty. I didn't need to carry it around with me. If I was thirsty there was always a water fountain or a garden hose available. I think we need to go back to glass bottles and invest in the water purification systems in our cities and towns. We are doing such a great job of recycling plastic bottles that we now have an unintentional man-made island in the Pacific Ocean made of plastic bottles and shopping bags. I'd be willing to bet that the largest consumer of water in plastic bottles and the use of plastic bags is the very state that is always yelling at the rest of the world about pollution. Namely California, the land of tree huggers, fruits and nuts of all kinds of varieties.

Start drinking your ice-cold Coke from glass bottles. You can still find orange juice in glass bottles. Beer is in glass or cans. (both recyclable). The very water that you are trying to protect from pollution is being polluted by the container you are drinking it from. 

THINK ABOUT THAT for a second.

Save the whales! Drink from glass instead of plastic.

Use paper bags that can be recycled without wasting trees. 

When was the last time you went into a forest and saw a paper bag blowing in the breeze hung up in the limb of the trees? You don't because they break down into wood pulp very quickly. I've been places where the forest seems to be untouched by humans, only to see a plastic bag flapping in the breeze of some beautiful pine tree.

Just think next time you are in Sams or Costco. Do I really need to buy a truck-load of bottled water? What's wrong with my tap water. Do I need another Wal-Mart bag?

Next blog I'm going to talk about renewable energy.