Small Change: No More Bottled Water

There are little changes I need to make to help the environment.  2012 is my time to catch up and implement permanent changes!

At work, our office goes through thousands of bottles of water a month.  And, I must admit, I am an off-and-on consumer of those water bottles. I stopped drinking soda a few years ago, so water and coffee (out of a mug) are my refreshments in the office.  Last year, I tried to use a reuseable glass for water, but that didn't last as long as it should have.  This year, in my spirit of resolutions about the earth, I am going to stop drinking bottled water at work -  Houston's finest is good enough for me. 

Except by the pool during the summer, we don't drink bottled water at home - mostly because we are too cheap to buy it for our kids.  We drank from the garden hose as kids, so they can drink out of the faucet or the filtered water from the fridge.   When summer comes, we'll change the process. 

Plastic bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a petroleum product, and their manufacturing process uses oil, a nonrenewable energy source, and increases CO₂ emissions.  It is amazing how many plastic bottles are consumed and become waste!  If not recycled, these plastic bottles accumulate and stress landfills.   Here is a list of plastic bottle fun facts from 2009 that put the magnitude of the pollution into scope:

• Plastic bottles take 700 years to begin composting;
• 90% of the cost of bottled water is due to the bottle itself;
• 80% of plastic bottles are not recycled;
• 38 million plastic bottles go to the dump per year in America from bottled water (not including soda);
• 24 million gallons of oil are needed to produce a billion plastic bottles;
• The average American consumes 167 bottles of water a year;
• Bottling and shipping water is the least energy efficient method ever used to supply water; and
• Bottled water is the second most popular beverage in the United States.

SO - I'm saying GOODBYE to this:

And HELLO to this: