Recycle Plastic Bottles for Green Living

When we talk about how to go green and what steps you can take to green living, you probably hear a lot about plastic water bottles or other plastic bottles. This is because they make up an incredibly huge amount of waste each year. In fact, studies report that Americans buy over $22 billion plastic water bottles each year. How many of those are you contributing to?

Statistics show that there are over 70 million water bottles used daily and only about 17% are recycled. There are 2 main ways to recycle plastic water bottles:

1. Wash and reuse the bottle personally as many times as you can.
2. Recycle the bottle through a recycling plant.

One of the biggest reasons people choose not to do the first option is that they do not think it is safe. Internet rumors and false news reports have fed the fear regarding reusing water bottles. The plastic is safe in commercial water bottles and you can reuse them and drink out of them multiple times before recycling them and replacing with a new bottle.

There are some suggestions to reusing your water bottles to make sure you do so safely:

• Avoid allowing the water bottle to be exposed to extreme heat. This can cause it to leach chemicals from the plastic into the water.
• Freezing will not cause leaching- regardless of what rumors say and is safe as long as you drink or remove some of the water first to allow for expanding.
• Always wash the bottle thoroughly with soap and water.
• Allow the water bottle to air dry completely before refilling it with more water.

You might be surprised to know that bottled water can cost 2500 times more than tap water and many brands are no more than filtered tap water. You could invest the same money into a quality water filter for your sink at home and save yourself money as well as save the environment.

Let’s look at the cost comparison for a minute:

• When buying a faucet filter, you can make water for about $0.10 per gallon
• You can use a tabletop model filter and make filtered water for about $0.25 per gallon
• Most bottle water costs about $3-5 per gallon
• Regular community tap water that is approved for safe drinking costs about $2 per thousand gallons

When you look at the numbers like this you can see how water bottles can add to both expense and waste. Next time you buy a plastic water bottle and start to pitch it in the trash, consider what you’ve learned here and what other options you have.

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