Forget plastic bottled water – instead use reuseable or biodegradable containers

Klean Kanteen at KleanKanteen.com $17.95 ultralight stainless steel 27oz water bottle.

Ok, so it isn’t a gadget per se. The shiny metallic glint threw me off. However, it’s green cred is considerable. I was just reading a great article about plastic pollution at alternet (discusses plastic pollution in general) and it got me thinking about plastic water bottles in particular and the various ecological issues surrounding their increasing use. MSNBC has a decent overview of the the problem in this article (from March 2005). Basically, in the past few years there has been an astronomical increase in bottled water, in the US consumers are using up to 70 million bottles each day and up to 89% of the plastic bottles are not recycled according to Container Recycling Institute. Furthermore, many experts say many times there is no good reason to pay for the bottled water as it is often no better than tapwater and can cost up to 10,000 times more!

Each day in the US more than 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away. Most end up in landfills or incinerators, and millions litter America’s streets, parks, rivers and the ocean. In the Pacific Ocean there is an area the size of Texas that is nothing but millions and millions of floating plastic crap. Most states don’t have a bottle bill that includes bottled water and often people are away from home when they drink bottled water so they just toss it instead of recycling. Here is another terrific article on the whole issue of bottled water ecology from the container-recycling.org.

Using a refillable container like the ultralight Klean Kanteen or other such “gadget” will go far to help solve this problem.

Another consideration is the new biodegradable bottles made from corn starch like Biota Spring water. They have an interesting video on biodegradable bottles and other information you can watch here However, one issue with this bottle beside buying bottled water when you probably would be just as good with tap water, is that these corn starch bottles may not break down in a closed landfill – as they may not have the microorganisms and composting temperatures needed to degrade. Still, it is far better solution than what is currently available.l

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Camping, EcoFriendly, Nature, Recyclable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.