Garden City Colleges Should Ban Plastic Bottles

Another misconception that many people hold lies in what happens to bottles of water once they are “recycled”. People believe that once they send a plastic bottle on its way to be recycled, it will be converted into a new, usable, recyclable container. Generally speaking, this is not the case. The majority of recycled plastic gets a new life as something non-recyclable, such as plastic lumber or parking lot bumpers. This does not amount to as high a rate of waste reduction as one would hope for.

There are many impacts that bottled water has on the environment. The choice of packaging determines many impacts. The bottles, which are either plastic, aluminum, or glass, that are not recycled are thrown into landfills and buried. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86% of plastic water bottles in the United States become garbage. If water bottlers would have used 10% recycled materials in their plastic bottles in 2004, they would have saved the equivalent of 72 million gallons of gasoline. If they used 25%, they would have saved enough energy to power more than 680,000 homes for a year (Jemmott, 2008). Incinerating used bottles produces toxins such as chlorine gas and ash. Water bottles that get buried can take up to thousands of years to biodegrade. The most common type of plastic is polyethylene

Water bottles are a staple in today’s society. In his article, “Costly water: Bottled and Sold: The History Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water,” author Martin W. Lewis quotes Peter H. Gleick when he says that, “Consumers buy bottled water for four main reasons: safety, taste, style, and convenience,” and he’s absolutely right (Par. 9). Bottled water is cleaner, healthier, and more convenient than tap water. More people are more apt to grab a bottle of water on the go, rather than fill a reusable bottle from the sink. It’s just easy. At least, that’s what we are led to believe. Bottled water is constantly in battle with its not-so-lavish counterpart, tap water. Some will even argue that the benefits of bottled water alone outweigh the cost. They, however, do not. The fact is, water bottles have plagued society for years and have become a growing menace to our environment and our people.

Many of people have not realized that the creation of bottled water affects our environment. The production of water bottles requires a large amount of water plus the water that is needed to fill the bottle. Considering there is a shortage of water in several places, water should be better handled and not wasted on plastic bottle making. Of the eighty million single serve bottles of water consumed daily, thirty million ends up in landfills (Soechtig, 2009 qtd. in “Bottled Water: The Risks to Our Health, Our

According to International Bottled Water Association they say that people use water bottles for lot’s of their on reasons and creativity. Also for school if the water fountains were not working then water bottles would be needed.Or when there is a natural disaster and water bottles are the only chooses but there are none what would schools do then.

One of the plastics that are used everyday are plastic bottles. Approximately 185 pounds of plastic are thrown away each year by the average american. Some of these plastics are plastic water bottles. Each year americans throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles. These plastic bottles end up in landfills or the ocean. When they reach

Have you ever considered what is happening to all the plastic bottles you use? According to "Bottled Water: The Wrong Choice paragraph 2" it states, that when plastic bottles are made we are using more fossil fuels. By doing this we are damaging environment!

You can’t walk across a college campus, past an office building, or through a park without seeing one, two, or ten empty bottles. Many are plastic water bottles. Trash bins overflow them. Those water bottles are a problem. Why? Because only one out of five bottles actually makes it to a recycling bin. Plastic bottles take centuries to decompose and if they are incinerated, toxic byproducts, such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals, are releasing into the atmosphere. The rest are littered on our streets or over filing our landfills. They degrade our landscape and damage our environment. In addition the plastic water bottles are not biodegradable that is, they don’t decay. They remain as trash a hundreds of years.

In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity (Standage). In the article “Plastic Water Bottles Causing Flood or Harm to the Environment,” the Earth Policy Institute factors the energy used to pump, process, transport, and refrigerate bottled water as over 50 million barrels of oil every year (Schriever). It’s absurd that so many resources are used to make plastic bottles which are not necessary at all. Bottled water does allow us to drink water out of it but in reality bottled water is very bad for

The main issue with bottled water is the effect it has on the environment. Plastic bottles are drastically increasing the size of landfills and can take up to five hundred years to decompose. At the rate plastic

We’ll start with how bottled water means more garbage. Most people, after drinking bottled water throw away the bottle instead of recycling it. This is why 70 million percent of human waste are bottles from water. Plus, a lot of times when you drive down the road the most occasional thing you’ll see are bottles. So, if your going to drink from a bottle then recycle

Speaker Credibility: I was one of the people that used water bottles because it made it easier for me to have water throughout the day. However, after researching and having a first hand experience with seeing animals that died due to plastic water bottles. I chose to make less of an impact on our environment.

The water bottle industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States. This being said, our landfills are filled with more than eighty five percent of plastic bottles. Their long lifetime and thoughtless consumers are not only filing our dumps with these plastic bottles, but hurting our oceans too. Since water bottles do not biodegrade, they can float aimlessly on the ocean surface for years. They also may cause a passing predator to be fooled into thinking it is a resting prey. Little did that predator know, they were going to have a serious stomach ache trying to digest a plastic bottle. It also pollutes the soil and waterways as well. Besides the space water bottles physically fill, their production waste is just as dire. In America alone, we use about seventeen

Only 20% of water bottles that are purchased make it to the recycle bin (Gunzelmann 1). So what happens to all the bottles that are not recycled? The bottles first photodegrade, meaning they slowly break down into smaller pieces, and then it is estimated to take between 500 to 1,000 years for the plastic to biodegrade. While the plastic is slowly breaking down, it either stays in a landfill, 38 billion plastic bottles end up in U.S. landfills each year ("Canned Water 4 Kids”); or it ends up in the ocean, According to Canned Water 4 Kids, there is a garbage patch floating in the Pacific Ocean that is estimated to be twice the size of Texas. No matter where the plastic breaks down, the tiny fragments absorb toxins which pollute our seas, lakes, and rivers, contaminate our soil, and poison animals.

Plastic water bottles are seen and consumed everywhere. Without knowing the deadly effects that water bottles have on the environment, consumers will keep buying them and contribute to the problem. About 17 million barrels of oil are used each year solely to make water bottles