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It always feels good when a Back2Tap campaign at a school goes right. I was so psyched to hear that the reusable bottles and bottle-less water coolers were well received by the K-12 students at Lincoln – Hubbard School in Summit, NJ. So well, in fact, the students are lining up in the hallway to fill up their custom reusable bottles from Back2Tap. The kids say that they love the tap water because it is so cold and refreshing.
students refilling their reusable water bottles
Bottle-less coolers are tied directly into the water line and provide cold, filtered tap water without the waste, expense and exposure to plastics found with traditional water coolers with the 5 gallon jugs that have to be delivered. Although Back2Tap does not sell bottle-less water coolers, we can recommend a manufacturer. Lincoln – Hubbard was able to use the profits from their stainless steel bottle fundraiser toward the purchase of the coolers. Best of all, this is one green initiative that will save the school money and the parents money while benefitting students health and ability to learn.
- A soccer player with one of our bottles
Did you know that Americans each drank an average of 218 bottles of water in 2007? bottles – 66 billion, in fact! Only 23% of them are recycled so on a daily basis, a staggering 140 million disposable plastic bottles go to landfills in the USA. That’s enough, laid end to end, to reach from New Jersey to China and back every day.
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- A soccer player with one of our bottles
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- bottled water bottles laid end to end from Xhina to the US
It doesn’t take an engineering degree to understand that this is a problem. It is extremely wasteful. To begin with, finite natural resources like water and oil are being consumed in the manufacturing of bottled water. It takes 4 ounces of oil and 51 ounces of water to make one 17 ounce bottle of water! Then after their use, 50 billion disposable plastic water bottles are dumped in landfills each year where they will take over 700 years to decompose.
There is a simple solution to this problem. Drink tap water instead of bottled water and use a reusable bottle when you are on-the-go. Even if you filter and flavor your tap water, you will save money because bottled water is 1000 times more expensive than tap water. There are many reusable bottles on the market today. For a high performance, high quality water bottle, try a stainless steel bottle from Back2Tap.
You can keep it simple and cheap. Forget all the powders, potions, and bottles of expensive sports drinks for your kids. Just send your children off to school and sports with plain old tap water in reusable stainless steel water bottles. According to Phys Ed: Are Sports Drinks Actually Good for Kids?, unless children will be exercising vigorously for more than 90 minutes, water is better for them. And outside of exercise, sports drinks are not a good choice – they are just expensive sugar water.
Most sports drinks don’t even come close to replacing the electrolytes you lose when you sweat a lot, so they aren’t doing what you think they are doing. If they had enough salt in them, you wouldn’t want to drink them!
For older children (10-12 and up) who are exercising hard for more than 90 minutes, dehydration is a concern and sports drinks are appropriate. Studies have shown that young athletes do drink significantly more water when it is flavored and almost twice as much when it contains electrolytes and carbohydrates, like a sports drink.
If you want to be green and frugal, check out this DIY sports drink recipe made with your very own tap water from “Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook,” 4th Edition:
Sports drink recipe from “Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook”
1/4 cup sugar (or stevia powder to be really healthy!)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup hot water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 1/2 cups cold waterIn a quart pitcher, dissolve the sugar and salt in the hot water. Add the remaining ingredients and the cold water. The drink contains about 50 calories and 110 mg of sodium per 8 ounces, approximately the same as for most sports drinks (unless you substituted stevia powder for the sugar).
So be green, be frugal, and be healthy, fill your reusable bottles with tap water, flavored if serious exercise awaits!
It is commonly believed that most disposable plastic water bottles are recycled and reused. In fact, close to 80% of used water bottles end up in the trash that piles up in our landfills. By switching from bottled water to tap water, we can help reduce the number of plastic bottles that get tossed into the trash. On average, there are 137 million plastic bottles that get thrown into the trash every day. That is enough, laid end to end to reach China and back.
Back2Tap makes it easier to turn away from bottled water with their stainless steel reusable water bottles. Consider the number of water bottles that you have used in your life until this point. Now consider how many more water bottles you have the potential to use throughout the rest of your life. With the help of a stainless steel reusable water bottle, you can eliminate 100% of your future disposable plastic water bottle usage and do your part in helping rid the environment of the millions of plastic bottles that are dumped in our landfills every day.
Environmentalism is a social movement which strives to preserve our natural resources and influence people to take steps to minimize the damage that we inflict on the Earth every day. Almost every major industry (including automobile, airline, public service, and household product companies) has made changes to their operations in order to function in ways that are more “green”. Even some of the companies that produce bottled water have taken action to have less of an effect on the environment by using less plastic per bottle. However, the strongest impact on the environment does not stem from the corporations, but from the individual.
There are many misconceptions regarding the effects of drinking bottled water as opposed to tap water. Many people believe that it is healthier to drink bottled water than it is to drink tap water. This is not correct. Tap water is highly regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency whereas the production of bottled water is supervised by the Food and Drug Administration and is not subject to the strict regulations that tap water must satisfy. There is also a common false assumption that bottled water comes from mountain springs which makes it better regarding both taste and health, when almost half of the water than gets commercially bottled is simply filtered tap water. Many people prefer bottled water because it is flavored when, in actuality, filtering and flavoring tap water is easy and inexpensive compared to buying bottles of flavored water. Back2Tap’s stainless steel reusable water bottles offer the individual an opportunity to reduce his or her impact on the environment as well as save money by drinking tap water when on the go.
Precycling. A new term I just read on iVillage.com used to describe the concept of choosing goods with less packaging waste. It falls under the concept of “reducing” in the EPA’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle slogan, but I like the “pre” part of it. This reminds us that we are supposed to consider the waste implications before we buy something.
These days there are so many choices – especially at the grocery store. You can buy packaged food as single servings or in containers large enough to serve an army. Last summer, I was lucky enough to meet a wonderful family of four from Venezuala. Veronica, the mother, stunned me when she mentioned that preparing meals for her family in the US generated four times more garbage than preparing the same meals back home. I still can’t quite imagine how they do it, and I’m sure she can’t quite imagine why we are so wasteful. Clearly, we have a long way to go toward reducing waste in this nation, but precycling is certainly a good step we can take as individuals right away.
At Back2Tap we sell reusable bottles and bags to reduce the use of disposable plastic bottles and bags.
Aren’t you tired of being asked to buy wrapping paper, candy, popcorn, cookie dough, or magnets at your children’s schools? The offerings are often way overpriced, useless, or just plain bad tasting. Last fall, when I was trying to figure out what sort of environmental project to do at my son’s school, the PTO president complained to me about the girl scouts drinking bottled water at their meetings and how great it would be if they would use reusable bottles. It was like a lightening strike in my mind. YES! That is exactly what we need – reusable bottles for everyone! We convinced the PTO to sell stainless steel water bottles school-wide and make it a green fundraiser. Before it was all said and done, it was a town-wide school fundraiser, involving seven schools – the first one of its kind in town. We decided to price the bottles close to retail prices to keep them affordable and still generate some profit for the school. We ended up selling 1500 bottles to a school population of 3500 students and raising over $8000! This was truly something novel: we sold something useful and earth-friendly while raising money for the school. A win – win – win!
