water fact: americans use 1500 plastic bottles every second
As we were checking out this morning’s blog posts, we saw this over at Treehugger: The US Consumes 1500 Plastic Water Bottles Every Second, a fact by Watershed.
We knew American’s were a plastic-loving bunch, but this number really struck home. Not only for its excess, but for the opportunity all those plastic bottles represent. Unfortunately, the sad fact is that only about 20 percent of those bottles make their way into the recycling bin.
In this economy, just think of the new jobs could be created if we focused on this “resource.” Here’s a sample of what we can make by recycling those 47,335,389,000 plastic bottles used each year:
Clearly, we need to significantly reduce our use of plastic bottles. But there are already billions and billions of them in our landfills. Realistically, we’re not going to end our addition cold turkey either. We’d like to see more businesses use recycled plastic, especially for clothing and carpet.
What would you do with all those discarded plastic water bottles?
We all know disposable water bottles are wasteful and bad for the environment, yet their production is growing rapidly everywhere. Just 20 years ago the market for plastic water bottles was practically nonexistent, but today we produce billions of these completely unnecessary products. There can be only one sane response, plastic water bottles must be banned!
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/10/water-bottle-manifesto.html