Making the Switch

Guest Blogger

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August 26, 2013

Plastic-Litter-300x204.png

Where does your plastic go?

This is a guest blog post is written by Eleni Eisenhart, a student in Downers Grove, IL.

Every day when I go out, be it to school, the store or just a bike ride around town, there is one thing that is always a constant in every setting: non-reusable water bottles strewn around on the ground. These bottles have become a part of my daily life, and not in a positive way. With the ever increasing dependency of more than half of Americans drinking bottled water, the need to conserve plastic and the resources used to make bottled water has become a significant issue, making the switch to reusable water bottles a necessity.

It has been shown that approximately 30 billion plastic water bottles are thrown away every year, with over 50 million water bottles not being recycled each day. These bottles are proving to cause a serious threat to the planet, considering that if they aren’t recycled, they are going into landfills, littering the ground and trashing our planet, to the detriment of all of us. With plastic taking around a thousand years to disintegrate, we need to consider if using non-renewable bottles is really worth it in the long term.

According to government and industry estimates, around one fourth of bottled water is bottled tap water, meaning consumers are being misled by bottled water advertisers. This means that while ditching bottled water will make a huge difference for the environment, it won’t have any impact on the quality of your water. We owe it to ourselves and our environment to make the switch, and to commit ourselves to helping the world move towards a better place to live and be a part of.

If you need another reason to make the switch, check your wallet. The cost of using bottled water can cost four thousand to ten thousand times what tap water costs.

Luckily, companies like Lush have recently taken the pledge to helping out the environment. Lush’s campaign “Take Back the Tap” is working towards encouraging their customers to take the initiative and switch over to reusable water bottles. With tap water being so accessible to us, especially in the school setting, it seems silly to not invest once in a reusable water bottle that we can use for years.

It is our job and obligation to the earth to do the research and open our eyes to the bottled water industry. To make it known to the 50 billion dollar market that we are not satisfied with the ways they are going about making bottled water, and its negative impact on our environment. To sustain the earth and its resources, change is not just a want anymore, but a need.

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