You wonder about people at times – what are they actually thinking when they make decisions. Going out to a restaurant or a café, or even in the supermarket for use at home, and they choose to buy a bottle of clear almost tasteless liquid that has been transported half way around the globe, instead of the locally produced identical equivalent.
Most people in rural Fiji drink their water – typhoid bugs and all, straight from the streams. But there is one plant with exclusive access to almost the only pure aquifer on the island, and they bottle all that water and ship it off to all corners of the globe, consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel in the process, and sell it to the stupid rich who think with their image instead of with their brains.
The plastics industry are so proud that they will tell you their production of plastic bottles has more than doubled globally in the last 5 years. Most of that explosion is driven by the increased demand for bottled water. And most beach monitors around the world can tell you where all those bottles have gone. Not into a recycling program, not even into a landfill. No, just tossed away to foul the ecosystems around the world and float back onto the nearest shore. And of course those bottles are all a product of the non-renewable oil industry. So if you stopped buying image-driven water, bottled in increasingly expensive oil derivatives, shipped using ludicrous amounts of oil, you would be doing all of us a favour.
For the sake of the planet, and your wallet, drink local water from the tap.
Tags: bottled water, ecosystem, Fiji, landfill, non-renewable oil, oil, plastic bottle, plastics industry, recycling, water
January 18, 2009 at 5:12 pm |
Plastic bottles are a growing problem in our landfills and oceans. We felt that something needed to be done……and now.
We knew that there wasn’t going to be one “fix it all” answer and began to wonder if anything was ever going to be done. The problem was growing every day, more bottles were being manufactured and more bottles were accumulating in places where we didn’t need them.
We were wondering if “Earth Friendly Bottles” would ever be available?
That’s why we decided to do our part and started ENSO Bottles. We are partnering with other companies to offer a PET plastic bottle that will biodegrade, compost or recycle.
Our bottles can be produced in a clear or colored version, however, clear version isn’t quite as clear as current PET plastic bottles but then again that’s one way to identify our earth friendly bottle.
ENSO is trying to achieve sustainability with our plastic bottles. Our goal is to make bottles that won’t have the adverse impact on our environment and are made from non food bio-fuels.
We haven’t started making them from bio-fuel but that’s high on our agenda and hopefully will be something we can offer in the future.
But for now, we offer a plastic bottle that is earth friendly…it’s just one step but if we all take just one step toward improving our planet….we will make a difference.
Now all we need is for a lot of beverage companies to start using earth friendly plastic bottles.
Max
January 19, 2009 at 11:48 am |
Neil Young sings that we have ’styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer’, and this sounds like the same thing. We should be doing without the bottles completely rather than trying to make the bottles a little bit less offensive.