As the world suffers beneath the weight of unreclaimable, toxic garbage in our landfills, the throwaway mentality that infected society in decades past is finally beginning to shift toward sustainable, recyclable green products that don’t clog our waterways and open spaces with permanent rubbish. One particularly ugly example of the problems clinging to the old ways created for us can be found in the hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles that end up floating around in our lakes, rivers, and oceans, or scattered alongside the highways.
The negative environmental impacts of this kind of trash are incalculable. We all need to work together to solve this alarming problem. One of the things you can do to help is to stop using throwaway plastic water bottles and start using reusable ceramic bottles like those produced by Frank Green, an attractive alternative that can last for many years to come!
Let’s take a closer look at the reasons why non-recyclable water bottles and other plastics are such a pressing problem in today’s already precarious natural world:
Perhaps the most obvious problem, because you can see the tragic effects every time you visit the beach, is the presence of plastic garbage in our oceans and other waterways. Water bottles are the number one most littered item, but bottle caps, baggies, and other odds and ends float along the shore in a garish plastic tide. While placing them in the trash is better than throwing them on the ground, landfill liners spring leaks over time and the toxins in plastics are released as they slowly break down and sift into our watersheds, polluting the water we need to drink and bathe in! Choosing to use reusable water bottles and other green products instead goes a long way to helping stem the poison tide
Another big problem is that so-called “Recyclable” plastic water bottles don’t actually get recycled as often as one might be led to believe they are! Only about 20% of plastic water bottles are actually recycled, the rest are dumped in landfills that only add to our polluted landscape. Worse yet, around 40% of all plastic packaging is carelessly tossed into lakes, rivers, and oceans, and as unbelievable as it may sound, this is the equivalent of a large municipal garbage truck dumping a load of rubbish into the water every thirty seconds! The rate of this plastic bottle pollution going into our oceans is expected to double to two garbage trucks by 2030. If nothing is done, by 2050 there will be more plastic garbage than there are fish in the sea, it is that bad.
This horrific problem won’t solve itself, we all need to take action and do our parts to save our beautiful world from this poison we have created. If you switch to reusable ceramic water bottles it will mean saving over 150 fewer plastic water bottles a year. The average person consumes 12 plastic water bottles every month, imagine if everyone stopped doing that? The garbage trucks slow and come to a stop. Not only will you be saving the planet, you will be saving money, too. Purchasing a $15 reusable bottle will save you around $7,000 in just five years!
