Drinking water is good, but not out of plastic bottles
By Michael Hughes December 20, 2009
Two years ago I sat looking up at the Flatirons. Little did I know a plastic dump two times the size of Texas slowly decomposed in a swirling vortex out in the pacific ocean as I sipped my water out of my plastic bottle and wondered where this one would end its’ journey.
Often times what happens is the plastic in the swirling vortex of the pacific gets broken down and looks like food to different species of birds, fish and mammals. The latest victim of this mismanagement of mans’ waste is the Albatross. Often found in it’s demise along coastal areas with bellies full of plastics of one or many kinds. A year ago I would toss everything in the trash. My girlfriend and recycle aficionado Jocelyn has shown me the errors of my ways. She is absolutely right. So now I recycle, compost or minimize waste as much as humanly possible.
Nurdles. Not just another funny name of a new cartoon character your kids watch. Nurdles are the tiny plastic pellets that are used in molds to create everything from plastic packaging to doll’s heads. So small are these oblong bits of plastic that they often fall through the cracks and out the doors of the trucks and factories that use them. They end up in the ocean. Shrimp, turtles, lobsters, fish and birds have all ingested these little plastic pieces thinking they were food. But plastic is indigestible, so smaller creatures like shrimp and bass die from constipation and starvation. As is often the case if they are consumed by larger sea creatures before their own deaths those animals eventually develop blockages in their own digestive system. Sewer systems and waste water treatment facilities do not have a means of catching nurdles before they get to water. Green Peace has found massive amounts of nurdles in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, the Red Sea and off the coast of the Philippines. Even the Atlantic is developing a bad case of the nurdle. In 2007 California signed into law a bill that forces manufacturers to mind their nurdles. But nurdles remain a huge problem around the world. For every square mile of ocean about 13,000 bits of plastic are floating around according to the United Nations. For more about nurdles go http://weblog.greenpeace.org/oceandefenders/archive/2006/11/whats_a_nurdle.html
Start today. TNT; Today Not Tomorrow. Get a reuseable glass or an unlined stainless steel bottle. You can filter your own water; and by looking online at the boulder county water site you’ll know what you will be filtering out. For more information about what is in your Boulder water go to http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/files/Utilities/Water%20Quality/waterqualityreport09.pdf Filtering your own water is pennies compared to plastic bottled water. Good, fresh, clean, cool, refreshing water. Take it with you to the office, your walk, your workout, your commute. Let’s clean up this mess we created, one bottle at a time.
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