Plastic Water Bottles: Facts About Pollution & the Harm Worldwide
How many plastic water bottles do you go through in a day — or even a year? Do you even think about a different choice when you’re in a place like an airport or a convenience store?
Unfortunately, too many people are still not thinking about that choice on a daily basis, and the globe is in the midst of a massive plastic crisis. Those bottles — all of them, single use — are accumulating in landfills and in our oceans. They are killing wildlife and they are suffocating the planet. And our consumption of them is only cementing our reliance on the fossil fuel industry.
If you look at just the numbers, it might shock you what’s actually going on with plastic water bottles around the globe. In the U.S. alone, people consume about 50 billion of them — yep, that’s “billion” with a “b.” And only about two-thirds of them are recycled. The rest? They just end up in the trash and then back in the world. In the U.S., the number is 7.7 billion in plastic bottle purchases — each and every year.
Of all the numbers of plastic packaging, the one that might be most disturbing is how much just goes into the oceans. About one-third of everything purchased ends up there, competing for space with all the wildlife and all the necessary pieces of the ocean.
But there are other options, we just need the will to take them. We can stop purchasing plastic bottles, for one. The replacement? A reusable version. Doing just that stops 156 of those plastic water bottles from entering oceans and landfills. Many municipalities are taking it a step further and banning plastic bottles as a whole. Doing so helps to stop our hunger for fossil fuels and reduces the carbon dioxide that we’re spewing into the air. What else can you do? This graphic explains it.
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