Such a pretty shade of green

With the go green! frenzy these days everyone is *hopefully* trying to do their part. But many still don't know where to start. Well here's an easy first step. Cut out bottled water from you life. Here are some reasons why:

• Every year Americans use over 50 billion plastic water bottles. 38 billion of those bottles get thrown away, unrecycled. Each of these unrecycled water bottles sits in a landfill taking up space and polluting our earth for over a thousand years.
• Plastics do not biodegrade and no naturally occurring organism can break it down.
• Globally plastics among marine debris falls between 60 and 80%. Hundreds of thousands of marine mammals and a couple of million sea birds die every year because of marine debris.
• Over 300,000 pieces of plastic per square mile have been found in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean.
• Plastics comprise up to 90% of floating marine debris.

If saving animals don't cause a stir inside of you (*gasp), here's something else to think about.

• The average American uses 167 water bottles a year, recycling only 38. 38 out of 167! That's less than 23 percent.
• Every day more than 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away in the U.S. SIXTY MILLION.
• Every single piece of (petroleum-based) plastic ever manufactured still exists.

If recycling isn't an issue you care about (*gasp), here is yet another approach.

• The plastic water bottles that Americans use every year take up to 1.5 million barrels of oil to make. The 1.5 million barrels of oil it takes to produce 50 billion bottles could fuel 100,000 cars for a year. On top of that 1.5 million are countless more barrels that are needed to transport it from as far as Fiji and refrigerate it.
• Last year North Americans spent $15,000,000,000 on water in plastic bottles last year ($46,000,000,000 spent globally)
• The 38 billion water bottles a year that end up in landfills is more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

So, instead of bottled water, invest in a re-usable water bottle. Nowadays it seems the most popular are Nalgenes (made of durable hard plastic) and the aluminum Sigg bottles in all kinds of colorful prints and trendy styles.
(I was a long time user of Nalgenes but recently got my first Sigg. Nalgenes are great but once I put that Sigg to my mouth, I knew I was in for a change. The Sigg bottles have the most wonderful ergonomic touch- the rounded rim.)
Where to get the water? Well, the tap of course. But if you don't like the taste of tap water, you can invest in numerous filters like Brita or Pur (available in most supermarkets, walmart, target, even on amazon). In the long run investing in a water filtration system and a re-usable bottle is much, much cheaper than continuing to buy bottles of water.