Disposing of our future

We all have items we can't leave the house without: keys, wallet, phone, lip balm, hip flask, brain. My essential item (although many of the aforementioned also apply) is my water bottle, constantly at the ready to rehydrate me during the day when the occasion arises. I could swear that sometimes just "knowing" it's in my bag keeps the thirst away. So you can imagine my parched distress when said bottle goes missing and I no longer have this amazing thirst-quenching device at my disposal! The key word here and the point I am eventually getting to is "disposal" and more specifically the issue of disposable plastic. You may be forgiven for thinking that this item which I am so clearly very fond of and attached to was one of those beautiful, shiny, stainless steel drinking vessels (which I have every intention of buying... one day), but no, the missing drink bottle was nothing more than a disposable plastic bottle which I buy and refill and eventually (as I had to do again today), replace.

Pictured above: Artist, Chris Jordan's depiction of the 2 million plastic bottles used in the US every five minutes.

 Did you know that almost every piece of plastic EVER made still exists today? The average plastic bottle takes 50-80 years to decompose, so the remnants of the first plastic bottle ever created are still somewhere on our planet as I'm typing this. Plastic bottles came onto the market in the late 60s and whilst I haven't been able to get my hands on an estimation of the number which have been produced and disposed of since then, I can tell you that in America alone 2,500,000 plastic bottles are used every hour with three quarters of them being discarded after one use. I can't even begin to fathom what the damage would be over 40 odd years on a global scale but you get my drift?  

"The plastic from a single one litre bottle could break down into enough fragments to put one fragment on every mile of beach in the entire world." - Qamar Schuyler

What's worse is that a frightening amount of this plastic waste (6 million tonnes per year) is ending up in our planet's vital life source, our oceans. The effects on our marine life are devastating (reason enough to make a change) but what many people also don't realise is that the consequences are transferable, the toxins from this pollution is moving up the food chain so we are simultaneously disposing of our environment and our health.

So what's the moral to this story? I don't think I need to spell it out for you but I can tell you this, tomorrow I'm going to buy that beautiful, shiny, stainless steel drinking vessel I've been dreaming of.