In one year alone each person in America will drink around one hundred seventy bottles of water but only a handful will recycle an average of only 23% or less of those plastic bottles. That leaves at least thirty eight billion water bottles in landfills and plastic bottles take at least seven hundred years before they even start to decompose in a landfill. Some plastics NEVER decompose; they will still be here a million years from now.

The cost of bottled water runs around $1 to $4 per gallon and over 90% of the cost is in the bottle, label and lid. According to statistics taken by the Beverage Marketing Corp, the basic, everyday, average American drank just over a gallon and a half of bottled water in 1976, that changed drastically by 2006. The amount of bottled water that was consumed jumped to nearly thirty gallons.

It takes about two million barrels of oil to manufacture just a single year’s supply of bottled water. That’s enough oil to fuel over one hundred thousand cars. Sadly, eight out of ten plastic water bottles become landfill waste thus costing more oil and money to produce replacement bottles every year.  In 2007 we spent close to $20 billion on bottled water. That’s more than most people in this country spent on clothes, video games or movie tickets.

If everyone in California or New York City gave up drinking bottled water for just one week, they would save nearly thirty million bottles from being sent to the landfill. If these same people gave up drinking bottled water for one month it would save nearly one hundred twenty million bottles. Doing this for one year would save nearly two billion bottles from going into the landfill.

Recycling plastic products would have a huge impact on the health of our environment and the planet. We can recycle everything from drink containers to shopping bags to the PVC pipes used in plumbing fixtures. Plastic is a product of petroleum, which is a non-renewable resource. Once the planet’s petroleum reserves are used up they are gone forever. This makes recycling plastic more important than most people realize.

The best way to recycle these products is to learn more about how plastic is made, where it is used, and get tips to find where to recycle them and learn what happens to these recycled plastics and what use it is put to.

Education is the key to getting people to understand that when they throw their plastic bottles and other recyclable items, such as aluminum and newspapers, away that they just don’t magically disappear. They are dumped into valuable land and pollute natural habitat. Eventually it all gets covered up by tons of dirt and just lies there year after year, decade after decade, century after century with most of it never decaying because air and light can not penetrate into the mounds of refuse to decompose it back into it’s component parts.

Make it a part of your awareness and your lifestyle to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Lets clean up our lovely little world and make her a happy and healthier place for all of her children to live.