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Reusable metal water bottles are popping up for sale all over the place these days. At the Go Green Festival in New York City last April, I spotted a stainless steel bottle for $27. At local grocery stores I’ve seen metal bottles for just $10. Custom logoed bottles can cost anywhere between $3.00 and $13.00. So what’s the difference? It turns out, plenty.
I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying: you get what you pay for. There are some serious quality issues with the cheap metal bottles – we know because we tested lots of them in the process of choosing a bottle for Back2Tap. We encountered leaking caps, paint that literally peeled off after a few weeks, logos that were printed poorly and faded quickly, thin walls that dented very easily, and poor polishing/finishing on the bottle.
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- Paint peeling off a cheap bottle.
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- Comparison of damage caused by dropping onto pavement when full.
Then there’s the question of what the bottles are made of – a cheap bottle may not be made of food grade materials. If you choose stainless steel rather than aluminum, you won’t have to worry about a cheap liner that may allow unwanted constituents to leach into your beverage. Back2Tap bottles are 0.5mm thick, printed with safe and resilient paints in the USA, and are tested to ensure that they comply with FDA and ASTM standards.
An acquaintance of mine sheepishly admitted to me recently that she had supplied her whole swim team with cheap stainless steel bottles last winter, and now regrets it. The bottles are so junky no one wants to use them anymore! At the Watchung Hills Green Day event in October, a customer who bought a blank bottle at our exhibit table admitted that she had just purchased a cheaper bottle at another table. She bought it solely to support the soccer team even though she knew she would never actually use such a poor quality product.
These two stories highlight the main reason Back2Tap doesn’t offer cheap bottles – and we have considered doing so, believe me! Plenty of suppliers have contacted us hawking their wares. Low quality bottles just don’t perform well and don’t last so they are not durable and useful, key requirements for sustainable products. Back2Tap doesn’t want to be fostering a throw away mentality by selling cheap bottles because that is exactly what we are trying to combat. We hope that schools selling Back2Tap bottles for a fundraiser do so with the understanding that they are promoting sustainability and environmental stewardship as well as raising funds.
In sum, there are numerous significant differences between cheap, low quality bottles and better more expensive bottles. If you buy an inferior bottle that doesn’t last or doesn’t get used, your effort to be “greener” or live more sustainably will have failed – so don’t even bother! A good reusable bottle can save you hundreds of dollars over its lifetime so it is worth investing in a high quality bottle that you will enjoy using every day.
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.
1 Billion. That is the number of disposable plastic bottles that could be kept out of landfills every year if just 10% of the students in the US, K-12, would switch to reusable bottles. This number is hard to believe and hard to visualize, but we’ve crunched the numbers and it’s true. The solution to this staggering amount of plastic waste is to reuse. By getting your children’s school to promote reusable bottles, you can help them “Join the Reusolution” and save that billion bottles.
Eliminating 10% of the disposable plastic bottles used by school children would also save 31 million gallons of oil, almost 400 million gallons of water, and 12 billion balloons worth (or 120 billion grams) of CO2 each year. The resources it takes to make these bottles is surprising, especially when you add them all up.
Collectively, parents would save over $25 million dollars in the first year by switching to tap water-based drinks from single serving drinks in disposable plastic bottles. This more than justifies the purchase of good quality reusable bottles.
To foster completely litter-less lunches, Back2Tap is offering reusable sandwich wraps and snack bags as well as custom-logoed stainless steel bottles for your school’s green fundraiser this year. Save money, save the planet - Join the Reusolution!
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.
The end of summer sends parents running to the store with lists in hand to buy tons of new school supplies. Do we really need to buy so much new stuff at the beginning of every school year? The USEPA hosted a roundtable event on August 25th with bloggers to discuss strategies for greening back to school preparations. To learn about ways to reduce waste as you prepare for school, check out these tips for a green fall and tips for a waste-less school year from the EPA.
Most importantly, reuse as much stuff as you can. Is a new backpack really necessary? I know my kids want new backpacks at the start of each school year, but if it’s still in one piece, why not continue to use it? Now that my kids are older and the load they need to carry is heavier, I bought them good quality backpacks with an internal supportive frame. Unlike cheap backpacks, these are going to last for years.
What about the notebooks, folders, erasers, scissors, crayons, and markers? These things can be used for more than one school year. Surely, you can put together a few sets of crayons and markers from stragglers found around your home.
For the items you need to buy, consider the safety of the materials. Try to avoid school supplies made out of PVC which contains toxic compounds. Buy notebooks with uncovered metal spirals instead of spirals covered with the colorful PVC plastic. For more ideas on how to avoid PVC in school supplies read this guide prepared by the Center of Environment, Health, and Justice.
Secondly, try to buy green school supplies made with maximum percentage of recycled content. We use strictly 100% recycled paper for our home printer, but you can also find other school supplies made out of recycled content.
To reduce the amount of disposable plastic waste generated during the school year, buy litter-less lunch supplies. In addition to a lunchbox, you will need a reusable bottle, wrap-n-mats to wrap sandwiches and snack foods in, and small plastic containers like tupperwear for cut up fruits and veggies.
All in all, there are many ways you can green up your Back to School shopping - buy less by reusing more of last years stuff, buy supplies with recycled content, avoid items made out of PVC plastic, and buy reusable bottles and reusable wraps for waste-free lunches, to name a few.
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.
As frugal as I am, I do not refill disposable plastic bottles. On rare occasions when I found myself stuck buying a bottle of water, I used to save the empty plastic bottle and reuse it. Not anymore. When I was researching reusable bottles last fall, I came across a Canadian study that had tested water bottles in a school and found that 13% had bacteria levels exceeding drinking water guidelines by the end of the school day. Worse than that, approximately 9% were found to have fecal coliforms. Ugh! Apparently, the children hadn’t washed their hands well before opening and closing the bottles. Even if hands are clean, there are bacteria in your mouth that will get into your drink. After sitting at room temperature all day on their desks, the bacteria had multiplied and the bottled water wasn’t too clean.
With all these germs, it is important to be able to get a bottle clean before reusing it. Disposable plastic bottles are made out of polyethylene terephthalate, PET or PETE for short. There will be a #1 in the plastic resin code triangle on the bottom. They are manufactured for a single use – the plastic is very thin and easily damaged so they are not designed to withstand washing or multiple uses. Getting them clean is also difficult because the top opening is very narrow. They never really get dry.
So recycle that disposable plastic bottle if you have to use one, or better yet, get yourself a reusable bottle like a stainless steel bottle with a wide-opening for easy cleaning!
Over the last decade, I’ve been feeling more and more out of step with my fellow suburbanites. I recently came to the regretful conclusion that I am seriously “old fashioned”. This was not an easy admission since I’m still in my 40s and working hard to stay as fit and mentally capable as I was in my 20s. Flashbacks brought me to my grandmother’s kitchen where there were all kinds of weird things on her drying rack and in bowls by her sink that she intended to reuse or compost. Uh oh, why do I have three plastic baggies on my drying rack and a jar full of rotting fruit and vegetable peels by my sink right now? Am I becoming, not my mother, but my grandmother?
Imagine my relief when I heard Slate writer, Farhad Manjoo, interviewed about the new frugality movement on NPR earlier this week. That’s me, I realized! I’m not “old fashioned” after all – I’m into frugality. I couldn’t wait to get back home and check out the Slate article and its links to frugality groups. I wasn’t surprised to read that frugality is different than being cheap or economical. It is a more deeply held conviction that we can live smarter, less wasteful lives. So, I can continue washing all my reusable bottles and plastic bags, drinking tap water, saving scraps, and using reusable bags at stores proudly now that I know I’m part of a new movement, even if it’s all about getting back to the smart ways of the “olden” days.
Ever wonder what happens to all the plastic bottles we use? A surprisingly small percentage of disposable plastic bottles are recycled – only 23%. The other 77% go to landfills.
Due to the complexity of reprocessing plastic, bottles collected for recycling are typically “downcycled” – that is, made into something of lesser value. Instead of being made into new drink containers, most are used for carpet backing, clothing, etc. The economics of this process are challenging in the best of times. It is cheaper to use virgin material – oil – than to use recycled plastic.
Given our current economic downturn, the economics of recycling plastic have gotten even worse. Prices for recycled materials have plummeted as demand from China and everywhere has dropped. According to a recent New York Times article, “Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up” recycled materials are accumulating by the ton and if things don’t change they may be heading for landfills instead of a second life.
Time to reuse, not recycle!
