My Mind's Ink

Introduction

I don’t accost people on the street drinking bottle water, “Hey! Do you feel good about yourself? Earth killer!” I wanted to say that because the following article may sound zealous, but I am not. Drink bottled water or don’t, either is fine with me.

This is a rework of Against Recycling Plastic Bottles. I wrote it as a speech for a Toastmasters competition, which is the reason for the conversational zealous tone. I won, which is surprising. So, although the article is repetitive to those of you who come back here regularly, it’s won an award. Award winning you could call it, if you were so inclined.

Kill Bottled Water

Any biological system must find a balance or it collapses and the living things within it die. Greenhouse gases, air quality, water quality, coral reefs, rain forests, biological diversity, and species extinction, we are pushing all of these factors, and more, in a negative direction. Every living system on the planet is in decline.

Recognition that our current path cannot continue does not require extremist views. We all agree that things could improve, so, we need to make changes. I am here to convince you to make one. I want you to kill bottled water.

It takes 3 litres of water to produce one litre of bottled water.¹ The energy required is equivalent to filling up each bottle a quarter of the way with oil. Plastic bottles take 700 years to begin to break down.² Ninety percent of the cost of bottled water is the bottle and cap.³ There are higher health and safety standards for the water that comes out of your tap. The bottled water industry has no redeeming features.

You recycle though, right. I mean, you’re not some heathen. Great, but recycling plastic bottles is a flawed concept. There is no utopia of recycling where all water bottles can be recycled and reborn as the next generation of bottles. Canadians are responsible for a billion plastic water bottles a year and one hundred percent of them are new. If you recycle a plastic bottle, it cannot be made into a new bottle.

What happens to the recycled bottles? That plastic will last for hundreds of years, but not as a bottle. The material is downgraded and must be made into other things, like the filling in jackets. When the parka is worn out guess where it goes? You have not changed the fate of the plastic bottle, just delayed it a few years. If you recycle a plastic bottle, the material still ends up as garbage.

We behave as though a recycling bin is a gluttony confessional that forgives all of our sins. I have read varying estimates about what percentage of plastic bottles are recycled. Thirty percent, twenty, it could be as low as ten percent⁴. My question is, who cares? If you are burning bundles of money to keep warm, the efficiency of the furnace you are using is not the point. We cannot continue to buy products that don‚Äôt make sense, and try make ourselves feel alright about it by recycling.

Bottled water does not make sense. Putting it in a blue bin does not change that. The answer is not to recycle an object. The answer is to recognize that we don’t need to make it at all. If bottled water disappeared tomorrow, the environmental benefits would be huge and the negative impact on your life would be zero.

I am not an extremist or a rabid environmentalist, and I am not asking you to be one either. You don’t need to make a picket sign or take part in a march. I am not suggesting that you give up your car. I am suggesting that you sacrifice a harmful and needless convenience. Stop buying bottled water.

Pepsi and Coke made $45 billion⁵ last year bottling water and other products. What impact do you think recycling has on their profits? The companies that produce the billions and billions of plastic bottles each year don‚Äôt care what happens to all that plastic. It has no impact on their revenue. You only influence large corporations when you make their environmental choices part of your buying decisions.

To affect a huge multi-billion dollar industry just stop buying their product, you won’t be alone. Bans against bottled water have been put in place in Nelson, Waterloo, Toronto, London, Charlottetown, and St. John’s. People are starting to pay attention to this issue because it is a small but winnable victory. This is not going to fix our environmental problems, but it will be a sign of change.

We should wipe out bottled water on behalf of the one in eight people on the planet that don’t have access to clean drinking water. We should stop buying it to send a message that being environmentally responsible is important. We should stop producing it to help the environment. We should stop bottled water to demonstrate our common sense.

This product results in significant environmental harm. This product does not need to exist. You don’t need bottled water. I don’t need it. No one needs it. Lets kill bottled water.

Alternatives

Permanent Containers

If you are using bottled water for convenience, replace it with a metal container, and fill it up with tap water. A good quality aluminum or stainless steel bottle will last indefinitely. There is no evidence to support claims that drinking out of aluminum is harmful in any way, but if you are at all concerned, get stainless steel. Outdoor activity stores like MEC usually has a good selection of styles and uses ranging from insulated to infant cups.

Filtration

Water tastes different depending on the minerals it contains which vary from place to place. If taste is your reason for drinking bottled water try a filtration option. Filtered water in a permanent container is a good alternative to bottled water. There are many different systems that vary in complexity and function. Keep in mind the potential need to dispose of and replace filters, which will offset some of the environmental benefits you are trying to achieve.

Larger Containers

If you are going to buy water in plastic containers remember that bigger is better. The larger the container the less waste you produce for the same volume of water.

References

Giving Bottles a Second Life – NY Times

Plastic Bottle Recycling Is A Dying Dream – Tree Hugger

Tap water popularity affects Pepsi – NY Times

How bottled water could drink Canada dry – Polaris Institute

Is bottled water safer than tap water? – CBC

Calculations for the cost of bottled water – Tree Hugger

Backlash against bottled water – Vancouver Sun

Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – TED

Plastic Bottle Recycling Estimates

• 12% of water bottles – MSNBC
• 90% end up in landfills – CNN

Bottled water bans: Vancouver, Toronto, London, Charlottetown, Owen Sound, St. John’s, Long Island, NY City, San Fransisco, Seattle, United Church of Canada. If you find others feel free to add it to the comments.

Footnotes

1. Estimates vary. I have read a reasonable looking calculation that claims the figure is closer to 6x, so 3x is conservative [↩]
2. The estimates for bio degradation of PET plastic varies [↩]
3. Considering the minimal processing required to put tap water into a bottle this is a believable figure, and one that is fun to quote, so I have used it. However, even though the figure is all over the internet, I freely admit I can’t find a good source for how it was arrived at. [↩]
4. See articles under the Reference heading for sources [↩]
5. Published financial statements for Coca-Cola Company and Pepsi Bottle Group [↩]

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I am not a rabid environmentalist. You will not find me chained to a tree, or carrying a “save the whales” sign. Recognition that our current path cannot continue does not require extremist views, it simply requires a grasp of basic high school math and biology. Any closed biological system must find a balance or it collapses and the living things within it die.

Human beings are pushing our system out of balance in a time frame unprecedented in the Earth’s history. Greenhouse gases, coral reefs, rain forests, biological diversity, air quality, water quality, species extinction, erosion, we are pushing all of these factors and more in a negative direction. Every living system on the planet is in decline. A correction in these trends is inevitable.

Recycling to the Rescue

The symbol has become pervasive. Blue boxes, bins, and bags are everywhere inviting you to recycle your unwanted mess. Doing so makes you feel like you are doing your part. The problem is that we are accomplishing nothing.

Short-term thinking is my issue with recycling. It is accomplishes two things: First, it makes us feel like we are doing something. Second, it ensures that we do not really have to deal with the fundamental issues. We do not need to fix our problems, we just need to delay the crisis until we are dead.

Bottled Water

Bottled water is a great example to illustrate my point. Bottled water is a unnecessary industry. No one needs bottled water. People over 30, like myself, can remember the birth of bottled water. If you had told us 20 years ago that we would buy water in little bottles at more than twice the price of gasoline we would have rejected the idea as ridiculous. Yet here we are.

A huge industry like that producing bottled water has an impact on the environment. Shipping, packaging, marketing, factories, and plants all burning energy to produce green house gasses, industrial water and air discharge. If bottled water disappeared tomorrow, the environmental benefits would be huge and the negative impact on your life would be zero.

Canadians drink half a billion dollars of bottled water a year. We do so for a variety of reasons: perceptions of quality and safety, and convenience being high on the list. We drink our bottled water and feel OK about it because we recycle.

That is short term thinking. We have created a temporary container out of a permanent material. That plastic bottle will last, in one form or another, for hundreds of years. That material will not be recycled and remade into a useful object for a few hundred years. Even if you put that bottle in a blue bin, the material is eventually going to end up garbage.

The process begins immediately with a fact that few people seem to know. One hundred percent of plastic beverage containers are brand new. There is no utopia of recycling where all water bottles can be recycled and then be reborn as the next generation of bottles. That circle of arrows that represents the recycling industry is a lie. If you recycle a plastic bottle, it cannot be made into a new bottle. It must be downgraded to something else, like carpets or filling in pillows.

Bottled water is just an easy whipping boy because it is so obviously harmful and devoid of any value, but it represents the bigger picture. Temporary things create our entire lifestyle. Take out containers, coffee cups, paper napkins, packaging, and IKEA furniture. The bookcase you bought from IKEA can only be moved twice before it breaks down into fragments of particle board. How many objects in your home have been made to outlast you? More than five years? Why not?

The Solution

Continuing to buy products that don’t make sense, and trying to make ourselves feel good about it by recycling, is delusional. Producing bottled water does not make sense. Putting it in a blue bin does not change that. The answer is not to recycle an object. The answer is to recognize that we don’t need to make it at all. Recycling is not the answer. Producing less is.

If our product choices really affected our lives, we would make different ones. We will refuse to support any product that produces waste. Starbucks must design a coffee cup we can bury in our flower boxes as fertilizer. McDonalds needs to package their burgers in something our dog can eat. We, of course, will buy a cup that will last our whole life and simply drink our water out of the tap.

Environmental change currently appears optional. The environmental choices we make do not directly and immediately affect our health, our standard of living, or our pocket book. The effects are slow and easy to overlook. We need to make them immediate and pronounced.

We are destroying the place we live, but we are going about it in such a half assed manner that we are fooling ourselves into thinking progress is being made. We are taking part in a massive industrial orgy of one time use convenience products. There is no point in being coy about it.

We are addicted to a way of life that will kill us. We need to hit bottom so we realize the mess we are in. The faster we get there the better, so let’s quit messing around and do it already.

Throw everything out. Lets have plastic bottles up to our necks and push things to a point where throwing out a bag of garbage costs as much as your rent. Change created by altruism is lovely, but it is painfully slow. Change due to necessity is quick and decisive. They say it is the mother of invention, so lets generate some necessity.

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