1,000 Years in China

That's how long it will take for this Aquafina bottle to disintegrate in a landfill (or anywhere else for that matter - since we export 40% of our plastic bottle trash to other countries, to be buried in other people's backyards- this little guy and 30 million of his closest friends - that's 30 million PER DAY, just in America).

Never mind that transporting all our bottled water uses approximately 1.5 million gallons of fossil fuels per year.

Plus MAKING enough plastic bottles to meet just America's demand requires more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year.

Of course it's not just us, although America is the leading consumer of bottled water, drinking 26 billion liters in 2004.

Mexico does its share, coming in second with 18 billion liters.

China and Brazil follow, at close to 12 billion liters each, followed by italy and Germany both using over 10 billion liters per country.

So maybe it's okay we ship our plastic bottle trash to China to be buried there, since they're generating their own stash.

But then, there's the fact that most bottled water starts out as tap water. And that tap water comes out of community water resources. In Texas and the Great Lakes area, bottled water plants have caused water shortages for farmers and communities. Hmm.

Possibly not the best use for a resource we cannot live without.

And that's how we came around to purchasing the re-usable aluminum water bottle above.

And buying a water filter system for the kitchen tap. Actually our second, since the first one was poorly made and fell apart after less than a year (it was made of plastic too).

One last plus for the aluminum bottle: it eliminates the plastic residue and chemicals from your drinking water. And plastic always adds a taste to your beverage. Those of you who are old enough to remember when pop came in bottles - remember the first time you had pop from a plastic container? ***TRANSLATION (for readers not from upper Midwest States): Pop=sodas=soft drinks=soda pop=coke= (in some obscure corners) fizzies ***

You can buy your aluminum bottle on line, and locally, probably at any "green" oriented store, or whole food coop. We found ours at Krogers. Right next to thousands of bottles of plastic water.