We’ve all become increasingly aware of the damage our over-reliance on plastic is doing to the environment. First, it was scaling back on plastic bags and now the focus is on the tide of single use plastic drinks bottles that are clogging up our waterways and oceans.
Sadly, while many of us are aware of the effect buying and discarding these bottles is having, sales of single-use plastic water bottles actually grew by 7% to more than £558m last year.
In the UK alone, each year an extraordinary 13bn plastic bottles are bought and 7.7bn or nearly 60% of those are water bottles. The average adult buys, on average, three bottles of water a week and although many of them are recyclable – although unlikely to be made from recycled materials – almost half are littered, incinerated or just go to landfill instead of being sent for recycling.
So what can we do to reduce our dependency on plastic water bottles?
June 19th is National Refill Day, a day dedicated to encouraging people to switch from a single use plastic bottle to a reusable one and filling it at home or at one of the sites listed on the refill.or.uk website or on the app. While tap water in the UK is perfectly OK to drink, if you’re trying to wean yourself off super-clean mineral water, then a filtered option is likely to me more to your taste.
Investing in a filter tap for your new kitchen – along with reusable water bottles for all the family – will help you to reduce plastic waste enormously.
Most boiling water taps, such as Quooker, have cold filter water options but if you want just a cold-water tap then look for brands such as Perrin & Rowe, Blanco, Grohe and Brita. A filter attached to a standard water supply will last from three months to a whole year depending on which system you invest in.
Using one bottle over and over again will have a positive environmental impact and although it takes materials and energy to make reusable bottles even if you buy one plastic, metal or glass bottle a year, fill it up at home from your filter tap before you go out, you’ll still be saving more than 150 bottles from the bin. Multiply that by the number of adults in the UK and the benefits are as crystal clear as home filtered water…
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