I like to watch many of these cool green DVDs, that are usually a little preachy, but yet, are good at getting your noodle thinking about things that we just take for granted now and then. However, this latest one that I watched… Tapped… really firmed up a lot of my feelings about bottled water. I’ve often wondered why we complain about $4 a gallon gas and then we pay out $10 to $15 a gallon for city tap water in a plastic bottle. Oh yeah, sure, we all have been brainwashed into thinking bottled water is some super filtered, safe and ready water source and so much better than that tap stuff. But in reality, the bottled water industry is unregulated and has no real standards. And the majority of easily available waters are just city municipal water sources, distilled or filtered. Yeah. They are. And if you prefer to buy the fancy foreign waters from Fuji or France, then you are not particularly helping the world’s oil resources since the cost of transport and manufacturing of that single bottle of water consumes almost one third of that bottle filled with oil! Yuck.
I think the thing that really bothers me most is the waste of those plastic bottles. Every single one is recyclable, but only 15% barely get recycled. And we consume over 80 million bottles… A DAY. Yikes!
Now, I will admit, they are convenient. They are handy in an emergency situation for sure. But, buying them for home use just seems wrong to me all the sudden. We actually have several refillable bottles and it just seems too hard to remember to fill them and BRING THEM BACK… haha…. Are we such a lazy society that we can’t tote back our goatskin water bags like oodles of our forefathers before us? And the major reason that so many bottles are landfill material is because we tote them around with us and there are not adequate recycling locations during our travels, so into the trash they go. No one I know of, saves those bottles to bring home to the curbside recycling box. Maybe some do, but well, not many I wager.
So, the girls and I have decided that we are going to cut our consumption of single serve bottles and cans to a very very low minimum. In fact, it would be good, if we could totally rid our habits of them. And we are going to start using our refillable water bottles. We have a Brita water filter jug and it works wonderfully. Our well water is nice and clean and tasty. The only bottles we plan to use are 2 liter bottles for pop… which we do like. (See, we’re not totally hippy chicks! ) More about those bottles in a few moments…
We made ourselves little home drinking glasses… by using a mason jar lid and poking a hole in it, for a straw. Now we can take our drinks with us outside, or around the house and they are safer from kitty knock overs and any straw or bugs getting in… and they are easily used on any jar size! Easy to take with us in the car, too!
The reason that we have decided on the 2 liters for Pepsi, is that I have finally found a good reason to save those bottles!!!! Yes!!! Finally! A group in Africa has finally come up with a way to use 2 liter bottles as building bricks… and the results are so beautiful!
Isn’t this beautiful? I love the curved walls and how the bottles look in the mortar. What they are doing is filling the bottles with sand, capping them and then layering them like bricks. To keep them secure in the process, they wrap the cap end with a wire or poly string, in a simple yet secure manner.
Isn’t that neat? Instead of being landfill, they are homes and structures. We are going to save up all our bottles and in the spring, try and build a little chicken hut or maybe a pig hut, and give it a try. I don’t think we drink enough pop in a year to build anything huge, but I’ll bet we could build a few little things here and there. Who knows, we might even start asking others to save their bottles for us, if it works well.
I realize that everyone is not going to jump on the band wagon and stop using those lovely little bottles of water and such over night. But just think, if you can limit your use to true needs, like vacations or emergency situations, and try to use a reusable bottle, I think that would be great. That is what we are going to do. Heck, even just the savings of several cases of bottled water can get you a nice Brita filter jug… and maybe a super cool reusable water bottle for each of your family members.
Take a visit and check out this movie’s website… and check out the movie on Netflix if you have it!
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Funny, I just did a post on water on my blog, too. I think it’s great that those bottles are being used for building. Have you seen this one where they are using bottles to ‘light’ homes? It’s another great idea and use for them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9sWk8s9-8E
Oh! I meant to say, I watched one of the BBC series (can’t remember if it was Edwardian Farm or which one it was) and they used glass bottles under the concrete flooring that they poured for their pigs to provide insulation. I thought that was a great idea and will be stealing it later on when we make ours.
I hadn’t heard of this movie… I’m going to check it out. It disturbs me so much when I drive across the lake nearby and see the water levels so low. We used to laugh when the level would get low and you’d see grass growing where water once flowed…jokingly we’d comment that someone needed to MOW THE LAKE… not anymore. Not funny to me.
As for the bottles …become building supplies themselves. Great idea. I would think for that to work here, you’d need to live in Arizona or New Mexico or West Texas even! I also wonder if the people are paid by the piece to fill those bottles and if it is done by hand or machine?
I’ve been re-using our 2 -liter bottles to store dry goods in them and they are difficult to fill when putting macaroni or beans or rice in them… a lot harder than grains of sand I would think!
Like this post. Am going to check out the other links. Have a great week, hope y’all are staying warm with your new stove.
Pat