Two Obvious Reasons to Start Reusing Plastic

Reusing plastic bottles is such an easy way of reducing your impact on the environment.  Moreso, the economics justify “religiously” reusing those plastic bottles that contain your favorite drink.  Let’s dive in.

First of all, we need to squash the myths surrounding the dangers of reusing plastic bottles.  The myth of reusing plastic bottles was started by an email hoax that was based upon a non-peer reviewed paper by a graduate student.  According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, European Food Safety Authority, and other health and safety agencies worldwide. PET (the plastic type most used in plastic bottles found on the market) has been tested extensively and no evidence of migration of toxic amounts of chemicals from the plastic to the contents has been found. So in other words, reuse those plastic bottles but wash them frequently with warm water and soap to avoid bacterial growth.

In case you are really serious about minimizing wastes, as well as, saving money, you should consume less. Also, concentrate on efficiency vs. convenience. After all, a huge amount of energy is required to make, ship, and destroy or recycle plastic containers.

Every time you wash and reuse a plastic water bottle, for instance, it lowers waste, conserves more energy, minimizes pollution, and landfill crowding. When you use tap water to refill a plastic water bottle, it needs significantly fewer resources. Compared to buying bottled water, which has been commercially purified, which traditionally wastes 3 times as much water in the reverse osmosis process.

Benefits for the environment

There are far-reaching benefits of reusing plastic containers in the environment.

  • Note, consumers throw away over sixty-million plastic bottles on a daily basis. All such bottles clog waterways; end up in landfills or incinerators, or litter roads and highways. Did you know that when plastics end up in landfills, they can take as long as seven hundred years to decay?
  • In the United States of America, plastic containers feature among the least recycled items according to the Recycling Institute.
  • When plastic bottles are recycled, it also signifies that there is a lesser requirement to make new plastic containers from petroleum resin. As such less trash will be piled up in parks, streams, and landfills. Plus, reusing plastic water bottles may considerably lower energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution.

 

Financial benefits

Apart from the above-listed environmental advantages of recycling plastic containers, there are certain direct, as well as, indirect financial advantages, which are as follows.

In the case you buy just one disposable plastic water bottle each day of a year, you are actually going to end up paying over $450 annually! Thus, purchasing and reusing a bottle every year can lead to significant financial savings.  Keeping in mind, most people consume several bottles of water and other drinks each day, that number can grow significantly.

Although you will appreciate that there are direct and substantial financial savings, reusing plastic drinking containers can also offer indirect financial advantages.  When natural resources are consumed less, there are fewer landfills and monthly utility bills leading to lower taxes and increased savings.

Reusing a single plastic bottle seems so insignificant but with scale it can make a real difference in the demand and waste of plastic pollution.  The myths relating to the dangers of reusing plastic bottles was one of the most impactful deterents of people doing the right thing of reusing bottles because with basic care (like you would with any beverage glass in your home) they can be used over and over again.

This not only helps our environment but can add up to some big savings, especially over time.

So do your part, reuse those bottles and then pat yourself on the back for doing your part in reducing our plastic pollution.

These tips and advice come from Fit N Seal ™, a product line that is focused on bringing a practical green solution to market with the goal of reducing plastic consumption.