How to Stop Using Plastic Bottles and Reduce Plastic Pollution?

Plastic Bottle Epidemic

For this project, I chose to quit using plastic water bottles. I chose to go down this path for my project because after the first couple days of college, I notice that our recycling bin was already getting really full and it was basically all water bottles. After a few days, we were almost finished with an entire case of bottles with an overflowing bin. It concerned me but my roommates and I didn’t trust the schools tap water. So, because there was guaranteed clean water that we know tastes good, we are going to drink the bottled water. Each of us used about 4 bottles per day, so that is around 12 bottles a day and this is just in one college dorm room. On the campus alone, there are around fourteen thousand students. Lets just say everyone of those students drank 4 bottles a day as well, that would be about 56,000 bottles a day from just this campus!

To eliminate all of my bottle usage, I purchased a 1 gallon water jug of three dollars. I drink all of my water from it and when it runs out, I just walk across the hall and refill it in the bathroom. I have grown to like the tap water and trust the quality unlike before. I started the data collection of over one month ago and I am still using it today. I see no need to stop this method, it is so easy and doesn’t cost me a cent. The gratification that I get from feeling like I am making a difference in the world is amazing. I have always been somewhat of an environmentalist. I have always cared about the environment, but I have never actually done anything to help make a difference. So having this project assigned was so good for me because is made me actually get out of my comfort zone, stop being lazy, and actually help a cause that I care a lot about. Besides changing my habits, this project helped me research and learn so much about the damage and the impact that single use plastic bottles cause.

Plastic water bottles are an issue in today’s society for a few reasons. Some of the issues is because of the producers and others are because of the consumers. The production of these bottles impacts the environment greatly. It is estimated that seventeen million barrels of oil is burned each year to make the bottles. That is enough oil to power one-hundred ninety thousand homes in the U.S! All of that burning oil has to go somewhere and that place is the atmosphere. Bottled water release two million five-hundred thousand tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. The producers know about all of these factors, but they will never changes because plastic is really cheap, fast and easy to use. The combination of speed, low cost, and it being easy to make into the product makes it the most effective way for them to make the most amount of profit possible. On the other side, the consumers are where the real problem occurs. People are extremely lazy and always looking for a sure thing, they get that with the plastic bottle. They are sold in bulk and at a relatively low price. A pack of eighteen bottles cost anywhere from about five-ten dollars. The water is always clean and has been filtered really well, so why not spend a few bucks on guaranteed clean water? With so many people purchasing this clean water, where is all of the plastic going once they are empty?

Water bottles are a recyclable product and many people do attempt recycle them, but there is a really harsh truth. In the U.S alone, there were about 167 billion bottle consumed last year and a only a depressing twenty-three percent were actually recycled. There is around thirty-eight billion bottles wasted every single year. Most people, after disposing of a plastic water bottle, never think about that bottle after it leaves their hand. Once that bottle is produced, it will be around on this Earth for much longer than any single human ever will. A single plastic bottle will last about four-hundred to one-thousand years to decompose and even then, they leave behind these little plastic particles which still contaminate the environment causing a lot of harm to the wildlife and plantlife all across the world. You can see the negative results of pollution from the plastic clearly.

Recently, between the coast of California and Hawaii, there was a span of water that was about twice the size of Texas. It was created from two currents coming together and making a slack pool where all the garbage collected. This Is a huge environmental concern. The mass of trash on the surface is killing entire ecosystems. It is blocking all of the sunlight from reaching the bottom of the ocean which is killing all of the plant life. With no plants, there is no food for fish to eat and then the predators that eat those fish die too because they starve too. Not only is it affecting life below the surface, but above the surface too. There have been thousands of dead birds found and dissected to try and figure out their cause of death. Scientists came to a very scary findings. A lot of birds stomachs were packed full of plastics and other trash. This is how the garbage patch was discovered. Researchers tried to find where the birds are getting all of the trash from. From all of the findidings, more research was done and scientists estimated that there is around 8 billion plastic bottles in or oceans. If us consumers continue to treat our planet like a trash can, we will eventually kill many other ecosystems and eventually entire species.

Green Hat 2018

Some more information that not a lot of people in our society know about is that a lot of the plastics we throw away is coming back to us directly on our dinner plates. If you thought plastic pollution in the environment was not something that could directly impact human health, you were wrong. And, depending on your diet, you may actually be eating a variety of nasty chemicals as the result of plastic pollution. Fish consume plastics both intentionally and unintentionally. And these plastics, depending on how long they’ve been floating in the water, may have a variety of chemicals attached to them such as heavy metals and other pollutants. Once a fish has absorb these chemicals from ingested plastic, the chemicals are then free to enter the bodies of anything higher up on the food chain which means us humans. While some fish sold in the United States is tested for contaminants by the EPA, the amount of chemicals in most seafood harvested outside the country is not known. By including fish in your diet, you may be consuming large amounts of harmful chemicals which can in the long term, really effect your health. With the amount of plastics fish are exposed to in our polluted environments, it really does become an unnecessary risk to be consuming all of these toxins. I feel that if everyone knew that if these extremely harmful pollutants were getting into their own bodies by consuming everyday food, they may be more susceptible to change their behaviors and mindset toward using one use plastic bottles.

The type of plastic that is used to create plastic bottles is Polyethylene Terephthalate which is also know as PET. The PET’s are produced from the burning of crude oil. Once it is all concentrated down from the burning, the remaining product is hardened and made into little pellets. These pellets are then sold the all of the manufactures. Here, the little PET pellets can be melted down and molded into any shape or form that the manufacturer wants. Specifically for plastic bottles, once melted, the plastic is put into a mold and then air is pressured into the mold which pushes the plastic to the sides where is will harden. To ensure the quality of the bottles and to make sure that they have the strength to hold the water, an extra layer of plastic is molded to the bottom of the bottle. Next, the companies simply glue the labels to the bottles and print anything on the outside of the bottles that they need to. Finally, they are filled with the filtered water and distributed all across the world to billions of consumers to buy, drink and create more waste.

Just because bottled water is filtered and has a brand name labeled on the bottle, doesn’t mean that it is better than tap water. Bottled water costs around one thousand times more than tap. A gallon of tap water will cost the average American about two cent. Meanwhile, a gallon of bottled water will cost the average American around sixty-four cents and this is not even including the costs for packaging and shipping. With tap water, you do not pay any of those additional costs. Also, there have been many blind taste test conducted by environmental protection programs and the majority of of people who tasted both tap water and bottled water actually picked the tap water as the better tasting of the two. The NRDC which is also known as the Natural Resources Defence Council, also conducted some tests. Over the course of four years, the NRDC evaluated over one thousand different water bottle companies to test there standards for their water. To their surprise, about one third of the companies violated their own standards of water quality. All of these examples really help prove that tap water can save you a heck of a lot of money, it is not held to very high standards and can be slack certain necessities, and it also tastes better as times.

In an ethical standpoint on this major issue of the pollution by single use plastic bottles, by helping clean up the environment or even just preventing additional pollution by not using the product any more, it can help boost your self esteem or just give you a good feeling inside. Ethics is defined as something that counts as a good, moral reason to do something. Quitting the use of plastic bottles surely counts as an ethical decision because it also falls under the two main ethical theories. One of these theories is called Utilitarianism. This concept says that we must act in ways to maximize our overall happiness. Knowing that you are making a positive impact on our world and society will certainly help maximize your overall happiness while also having a positive impact on the future of our society, generations to come and the planet in a whole. The second main theory of ethics is called Kantianism. This concept says that people need to think about the consequences of all of our actions. We really do need to apply Kantainism to our lives, but especially in the plastic bottle industry. When you purchase a bottle, finish it, and then throw it away or leave it in the woods, it doesn’t just go away. It will sit there until moved to a different place by nature. Just because its out of site and out of mind, doesn’t mean that it’s still not there. If everyone thought this deeply before purchasing plastic bottles and knew all the consequences, then there would be a lot less pollution in the world. The bottle manufacturers would go out of business which would cut down on a lot of carbon dioxide emissions from the 17 million barrels of crude oil burned per year in the U.S. This is just the beginning of the differences that could be made.

The idea of single use plastic bottles in entirety, is absolutely terrible. The only positive that they give our society is a reliable source of water which can be sent around the world to help people that are in desperate need of them. This happened when there is a natural disaster or severe flooded where there is no access to clean, safe drinking water. But on the other side of the spectrum, there are an insane amount of negative effects on our world. One of these issues is the crazy amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the manufacturing plants which contributes to global warming. Then, again, there is the physical pollution on land and by sea. They take forever to decompose and even when you can’t actually see them anymore, they leave behind small particles of the toxic plastic for animals and sea creatures to ingest which. Also, the fact that we are affected by the animals consuming the plastic because we eat them, should really concern everybody. We are slowly destroying our planet and every living thing that exists on it. By eliminating or even just reducing our individual use disposable plastic water bottles, we can really make a difference. By changing our habits, we can hopefully slow down global warming, reduce the amount of pollution on our planet, and really just save lives of animals and the lives of our future friends, family, and the future of our species. So go out in the world and make a difference. It’s not a hard task to accomplish, trust me, I have been doing it for over a month. By switching to a reusable bottle, you will feel great about yourself, help the environment, save money, and just help make a difference in a world that needs it so much help.

Anytime we use a plastic water bottle there is an animal dying. They end up dying from their inability to digest so many forms of plastic that humans have dumped into their home. We pollute their habitats, destroy their homes, and kill millions of animals every year because people are too careless to just switch to permanent water bottles or try to find another way to save our environment. When I looked at this issue from a moral standpoint, I realized that every time I chose to use a reusable water bottle, I was able to better the planet and have one less water bottle out in the ocean, one less animal that didn’t die. As I continued to do that I was able to feel better about myself and feel like a was making a difference. I able began to educate others, wanting to make even a greater difference. I got my roomates and a lot of people in my dorm to switch to reusable water bottles. As more and more people began to join in with me I began to feel like I was making an actual difference. I felt like I was saving so many animals and helping to preserve the earth. This project has been so eye opening and I’m truly glad that I did it. I will continue to use reusable water bottles and educate others in the future.

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