Water Bottle Waste

I just heard from a friend that this week is National Drinking Water Week, sponsored by the EPA. She told me that as she was watching "Good Morning America" she realized just how great of an impact bottled water has had on landfills, and so I had to hear for myself. According to the show, Americans consumed 50 billion bottles of water in 2006, and 38 million landed in land fills. That is a significant recycling effort, but there is still the matter of the ones that didn't make it to the recycle center. After giving an interesting estimate of how many times we could go to the moon and back with a line of these bottles, they featured two newer companies which "bottle" their water in paper packaging. The great news about these is that they are not only recyclable, but also compact when empty, making them more efficient to transport to the bottling facilities. Those that don't make it to become notebook paper or napkins, are also less likely to crowd up land fill since that are mostly biodegradable.

My personal thoughts lean more towards the use to reusable bottles that can be fill infinitely. I own a green one from the company Nalgene, which I fill with filtered tap water and take with me on the run. I can see where the convience factor of bottled water comes in because you never have to clean the disposable bottle or search for it in your apartment when you are running late, you simply grab a new one on your way out. But with the growing number of problems we have introduced to this planet, maybe we should take a step back and wonder what the fate will be for the bottle you just grabbed from the vending machine. Is it going to end up in a mount of garbage for hundreds of years? Even with the best intentions, most of us have at least been tempted to toss a bottle into the trash to keep from toting it around until you find the next recycle bin. I would like to say this has never happened to me, but there have been plenty of times I tossed recyclables into the trash, thinking just one bottle can't hurt. But there are over 300 million people in the country who may have the same thought. This kind of thinking, I'm sure, is reponcible for many of those 38 million bottles.