Boycott The Bottle
Twenty years ago, if you had told me that in the first decade of the 21st Century billions of people would be guzzling water from disposable plastic bottles I would have told you that your crystal ball needed cleaning. By then, I just knew, we'd have cars that get less than 50 miles per gallon and that big business would be tamed by social conscience and the heeded outcries of the wronged citizenry. That assumption now seems depressingly naive. However, one thing that can be changed by us instantly is the ubiquitous plastic water bottle: that convenient yet so incredibly expensive “commodity.”
Billions of plastic bottles of myriad sizes and contents have for 20 years been joining the already burgeoning mountains of trash at all of America 's landfills. “But the bottles are recyclable.”
That point is moot. It's a trade-off of a very dangerous kind: Even if people bother to recycle (where it's available!) it still takes energy to haul away millions of bottles, to separate them and then melt them down again, purify that, etc. Lots of heat, many steps, and tons of energy. For nothing but convenience. It seems that convenience is ruining our planet.
Even more insidious is that we've been trained (and how our children have been trained even more thoroughly) to accept water as a commodity rather than as something we all have a right to—like clean air—and that must be cherished. This is a hazardous shift because it lends weight to the increasing pressures to convince us to privatize the water supply, along with just about every other function of the government we pay dearly for. As if a private, for-profit corporation (with limited liability) can “do the job” more efficiently and cost-effectively than a dedicated public utility.
Another aspect of the small plastic bottles is that they exude harmful chemicals into the supposedly pure water they contain. If the bottle is exposed to sunlight (as so many are on the beach), then the toxicity is magnified.
If you don't have a home purifying system, try buying large hard-plastic (more chemically stable) bottles and filling up at your local water store. Transfer the water into gallon glass bottles and do place these in the sunlight (just the opposite of plastic). The sunlight will raise the water to its highest energetic level and help neutralize any chemicals from the plastic bottle. Rotate several bottles so you always have some on hand.
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