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Monday, September 15, 2008

Plastic Water Bottle Animation

This pretty much speaks for itself.

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Posted by Dave at 9:15 AM

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7 comments:

Studio38 said...

Dave - I read online somewhere about reusing Brita filters so I tried it out. You just make a hole in the top - dump out the material in there - refill it with activated charcoal and put a cork or rubber stopper in the hole. I just did this yesterday and it works great. I was just drinking tap water to avoid buying it in bottles, but this gets rid of the chlorine taste, so I am happy with it! Cheers, Liz

September 15, 2008 at 1:55 PM
CAT Productions said...

Great video! Thank you for helping to spread the recycling word!

September 15, 2008 at 2:15 PM
Neal McBurnett said...

The focus here is all wrong. Send any water bottles you get back to the source with a "thanks but no thanks", and drink from the tap. Recycling plastic is expensive and still results in a degraded result. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling

September 15, 2008 at 8:57 PM
Dave said...

Neal,
Funny you should write that cuz that's exactly what i feel. Ironically I saw the video as an indication of the amount of water bottles we use, not as a message to recycle more as recycling, while better than throwing out, is a crutch. Thanks for pointing it out - sometimes things look different from inside a bubble.

That said, I don't think we should be sending somehting like water bottles back to the source if we have bought them int he first place. Just don't buy them to begin with.

Consume Less, Conserve More!!!!

dave

September 15, 2008 at 11:09 PM
AndyB said...

A very telling animation - but only part of the story.

How many plastic bottles are used each day for carbonated soft drinks? That number is much higher, and I can argue against the lack of nutritional value in soda (or pop, depending on what part of the country you live in). What about other uses of plastic bottles?

If the use of plastics is harmful, then time is likely better spent going after those areas with the largest impacts.

Additionally, in order to successfully argue against something it is always best to have a solution in hand. Yes, US tap water is as good, if not better, than most bottled water. There are times, however, when packaged water is a necessity. For example, emergency response for natural disasters when the water infrastructure is damaged.

My point is that there may always be a perceived need for packaged products. The question then becomes how to provide those items in a package that can be reused, with minimal transportation/production impacts, and without the use of harmful substances.

Lowering consumption should be the end game. Having a well defined path with intermittent steps will help bring people along more quickly. All we can do is keep working on it in our own lives and the lives of those around us to affect as much change as we can!

September 16, 2008 at 5:37 PM
Neal McBurnett said...

Thanks, Dave. The only place I run across water bottles is at conferences and similar events. That is where I "take them back to the source" - e.g. use them to start a conversation with the event organizers about how wrong it all is.

There is a great quote by Nicholas Negroponte about folks pushing for protection of the American computer industry and drinking water from Evian France - i.e. they "could not even provide American water at an American conference."

http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/ch00c01.htm

September 17, 2008 at 1:01 PM
Anonymous said...

As Neal pointed out, those plastic bottles are barely worth bothering to recycle.

Around these parts we have district heating. Everything from heavy oils, biomass, heat pumps(powered by nuclear in the off hours or hydro plant in the spring season) and burnable trash is used to generate the heat. This is where most of our plastic bottles end up.

September 25, 2008 at 11:42 PM

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