There are too many plastic bottles in the world. Think about it: the damn things are everywhere. We need to do something about it. Allow me to explain.
I ride my bicycle five or six days each week. Hydration is a critical part of any cycling program, so I carry a reusable bottle filled with Gatorade. Instead of buying bottles of Gatorade in ready-to-drink form, I buy the powder and mix the drink before I head out. This practice has three advantages:
- Cost. Working from the powder, the cost per 24-oz. bottle is only a fraction of the cost of the ready-to-drink version.
- Control. The powder allows me to control the mixture–I like a stronger concentration that what I get with the ready-to-drink version.
- Plastic. I’m not contributing two plastic bottles per ride to the world’s landfills.
#3 is the only one you should care about, whether you’re a bicyclist or not. The fact I’m not consuming two plastic bottles per day helps, in a very tiny way, to control oil prices. (Oil is one of the products used to make a plastic bottle.) Additionally, I’m not contributing to the world’s landfills.
As I was filling my bottle this morning, I thought of all the plastic bottles in my home that we use for a few days or weeks to hold some kind of fluid that could, in principle, be kept in a reusable container.
The most obvious example is water. It’s amazing how many water bottles are used in the United States. A small percentage are probably reused once or twice, but most are used only once. I can think of no good reason for this practice. Brita has developed a compelling add campaign attacking plastic water bottles, in an effort to help them sell more filters. I own no stock in Brita, but they made a good point, and hopefully plastic water bottles will soon go the way of the Dodo.
But there are many other examples of plastic bottles in our home:
- milk
- soft drinks
- shampoo
- sun screen
- ketchup
- syrup
- motor oil
You can probably add scores of other fluids. As I look around my house, these damn plastic bottles are everywhere. There is almost no shelf in my home that isn’t occupied, and in some cases completely covered, by plastic bottles.
Why do need plastic bottles for all this stuff? It seems nearly all the fluids we use day to day could, in principle, be stored in reusable containers that are refilled from time to time.
We utilize reusable containers for several fluids, including Gatorade (as noted above), orange juice, Kool Aid, and tea. In each case, of course, we’re mixing or unfreezing something to make the liquid. I don’t think we can easily mix up shampoo or maple syrup. These kinds of things would have to be refilled at the grocery store. But it’s not impossible to set up a such a system.
Making the switch from plastic bottles to reusable ones, perhaps made of plastic, or metal, might be difficult and expensive. But it would be interesting to analyze some models to see if the new practice could pay for itself by reducing the number of plastic bottles we have to manufacture–nearly all of which are used only once and then discarded to a landfill where they probably last essentially forever.
What would a grocery store look like if we did this? Probably pretty strange, but if we’re careful the system could be manageable. After all, we put a guy on the Moon, right? What would landfills like? Less full.
