On this 40th anniversary of Earth Day, I challenge you to stop buying plastic bottles of water.
90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans is believed to be plastic.
“Charles Moore, an American oceanographer discovered the “Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” or “Trash vortex” by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race.
the “plastic soup”
According to an article in “The Independent“ on February 5, 2008:
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents.
This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Only five hundred miles away from my home in L.A. …
The newspaper article also includes the UN Environment Program’s statistics that plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year.
Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.
What can you do?
Step one, stop buying bottled water.
Don’t listen to the multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns that imply that bottled water is cleaner and safer than tap water because
bottled water can have just about the same levels of contaminants as tap water. In fact its very often just bottled tap water.
In the United States we consume two million beverage bottles every five minutes. Ouch!
Watch Charles Moores’ TED Talk…
It’s easy to use refillable bottles. Mr F and I have been filling ours for about a decade now. We even took them to Italy last year.
Mr F refills his water bottle at a public tap in the Cinque Terre, Italy
Wondering Rose 
amen, sister! i hate that plastic crap — and make my kids fill up their bottles instead of buying new. it literally makes me ill to think of that floating garbage dump — we should start a campaign to pay some underemployed fishermen to go out and pick it up!
Yes, ma’am! And aside from all the reasons you list, bottled water is increasingly symbolic in the dangerous shift toward the privatization of water. We support a basic people’s right by not buying bottled. By the way, love the photo of Mr. F modeling his canteen.
Mr. F is a great model indeed!!
Love ALL your visuals. Great blog Rosie!!
Here’s another one you should know about, also by a writer friend interested in the environment: http://www.chasingcleanair.com
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In South Australia we have a 10c deposit on plastic bottles, and ordinary people go around and collect the bottles out of bins and the streets to make money. I believe our recycling rate is around 90% This system should be implemented around the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation
Hi Amanda,
Welcome you to my blog, and thank you for your comment. A 90% recycling rate is wonderful encouraging news. Congratulations Australia 🙂
We also have a deposit on bottles – plastic and glass – in the United States and its an easy way for people to make some cash, but I don’t think our recycling rate is anywhere as high as yours.
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Thank you for sharing a post that inspires us to take care of nature and to do our part in preserving it. And yes, I will stop buying the plastic bottles. After seeing the river of platic bottles, I really felt bad. We all need to wake up! Take care…
Hello IT,
I’m glad you found this post. Thank you for your comment.
It’s important for each and everyone of us to be aware of the dangers of plastic. The easiest way to start, is to buy your own water bottle and fill it up each day. If you just do that you’ll save 365 bottles a year and also be teaching your son to respect the earth.
Hi there! I actually signed a pledge last year to stop using them…and didn’t realize until I did so that I really do grab for plastic a lot of the time…putting my name on that dotted line really did the trick – no one in my family has touched a plastic bottle since!
anne
Hello Anne,
I’m so pleased that found this post. Although it’s not a recent post, it’s unfortunate that people are still using plastic. Every time I’m in the supermarket I see shoppers putting plastic bottles of water wrapped with yards of plastic wrap in their carts and my heart sinks…
Glad to hear you signed a pledge to stop using them. Thank you for your comment.
You always try your best to focus on the issues which are important to us. That’s the best thing I like about your blog. We all need to realize the sensitivity of these issues. We do not use plastic bottles here, yes sometimes we do use refillable bottles when we go outside.
aw shucks thank you for your nice comment Arindam 🙂
I’m so happy to hear you don’t personally drink from plastic bottles.
I’ve read stories from travelers in India who’ve gotten very ill after buying what they thought was a new bottle of water from a shop in India but discovered after they got ill that the shop keeper had taken used plastic bottles, filled them with tap water and somehow made it look as if it was sealed from the factory with “clean” water.