Water Bottles

My son, daughter and a cousin from New Jersey considered a growing problem ... water bottles.

"How did this happen?" they yapped at the kitchen table. Water. It's clean, it's natural, it's essential ... but bottled water? It's stupid. Think about it. Water is virtually everywhere. In the U.S. it is plentiful, clean and piped into most homes. Yet we use chemicals, including petroleum to manufacture millions of plastic bottles. Then we use more environmentally unfriendly chemicals to prepare the bottles. Then to protect the bottle's long shelf life, we heat, purify and "enhance" the water, using still more energy.
But that's just the beginning. We either chop down trees or make more plastic to put the bottles in cases. Then we then employ trucks, fueling and lubricating them with oil so they can expend the oil in the form of exhaust as they carry bottles from places like as Oregon to New York and from places like San Antonio to Denver.

But we are still not close to being done with this story. We then retail the bottles in grocery and convenience stores, sometimes storing them in refrigerators sustained by electrical plants fed by more oil. Finally, someone buys the water, ignoring the faucet in the kitchen and driving to the store.

......

But what set us on the topic was not bottles of water, but emptied bottles of water. A day before, we had celebrated my eldest daughter's high school graduation, an occasion for much food and drink. As we gathered in the kitchen, the children for the purpose of finding a snack and me for the purpose of separating out the last of the many bottles and cans that never made it to the "blue" bin, the lunacy of the bottle became a brief topic before passing us over.

My eldest son began searching the refrigerator for one of the new bottles of water that appeared for guests the day before. I noted that the "party" drinks were done, as I dumped the remaining empty bottles into the recycling bin. He then went to the small refrigerator where we keep the cold refills of "recovered" water bottles. We retrieve them sometimes after playing basketball the park. Early that morning I had applied extra warm suds to a few of the leftovers from the party, filling them with clean water from our faucet. He pulled bottles from the mini-refrigerator for his sister and cousin.

They all knew they were doing the real recycling while I, filling two large bins with discarded bottles, was simply engaging in therapy. Recycling is indeed therapeutic for me, it makes me feel good, separating the paper from the bottles, religiously placing the blue and green bins in front of the house for Tuesday pickup. But it is mostly therapy.

As the children watched me practice good container hygiene, they continued the conversation that is the basis for this blog entry.

What we do in the U.S. is not very good recycling. The entire process of haul, sort, clean, melt, ... is so expensive and uses so much energy, it's only true value is that it keeps some of the many millions of bottles out of land fills.

True recycling is what we do at home, and what families do in nearly every third world country.

The Jones' basic water bottle recycling rules:

Drink tap water (for you youngsters, that's water from the faucet). We keep a Brita pitcher in the refrigerator at all times.
If someone does somehow acquire a plastic water bottle - rinse it, refill it from the faucet, and place it in the refrigerator.
Repeat rule #2 three times.
Dispose of the waste bottle in a recycling bin.

A couple years ago, we didn't have limits on rule 3. We would use a bottle until it looked like it was "done", generally about five times. Then at some point, either my wife or one of the kids pointed out that plastic shouldn't be used so long. So, we set the limit to three uses. Doing the math, if everyone in the U.S. used water bottles three times before recycling, we would keep 40 million bottles from being disposed of each day and save 14.6 billion bottles each year. That's a lot of green.

For More Information
see Container-Recycling.org