Urban Survivalists

This week we decided to take a break from doing the builds and dive into the summer spirit. People tend to buy more liquids to quench their thirst when the hot weather roles in. We are here to encourage you to think twice about buying a plastic bottle of any tasty drink. We would prefer you have a reusable bottle that can be refilled and here is why:

1. Majority of bottles are not recycled and end up in landfills or the ocean, under 5% are recycled, see video below.
2. You can save a lot of money from not purchasing drinks in plastic bottles over time.
3. The bottles take up space in landfills and decompose VERY slowly, 450yrs for a soda bottle: That Danny
4. The health effects of drinking soda aren’t exactly spectacular either: Wise Geek

Check out this link for reasons not to use bottled water: The Good Human. But, we would prefer that you don’t purchase plastic bottles at all rather than just limit bottled water consumption. Also treehugger has some really good information on why to ditch plastic bottles.

Basically, plastic bottles are ending up in places on Earth in which they can’t be cleaned up. There is no solution for cleaning the oceans currently other than to just wait for the plastic to go away. This means that we need to stop throwing away and using plastics in the first place so that those products don’t continue to litter our environment. If you would like to know more about how plastics are affecting our oceans and sea life, then see this article by Wired called Drowning in an Ocean of Plastic.  After reading this, we were a bit horrified and upon further examination of the interwebs we found these videos:

This second video is almost twenty minutes long, but it is definitely worth the watch and support.

We all need to start taking responsibility for the things we throw away.  By simply controlling how we consume, we all can make a difference.

The sad part is that even though people know that our current throw away societal system is bad for the environment, we still do it anyways. We are asking you to resist the urge! That little voice in your head that says, “If I only do it once, no one will notice and it wont really have an impact”.  Well there are about about 6,706,993,152 (July 2008 est.) people in the world and if they all said “just once” and acted on it, we would a LOT of trash to deal with.

Here are some easy things you can do instead:

1. Buy a reusable water bottle (one that is recyclable when its life use is over). We recommend SIGG water bottles, but there is also Klean Kanteen
2. Reuse store bought water bottles, but be informed about the safety of this practice with Plasticsinfo.org
3. When you eat out, go to places that are sit down restaurants, that actually give you a glass cup rather than a throw away cup.

And as always, we are trying to lead by example with this blog, so here are some images of our SIGG water bottles made from recyclable aluminum. You can see that Stan’s has seen the horror of blunt force trauma many times from being dropped on his bike   The nice thing about SIGG bottles is that there is a coating on the inside of the bottle to keep liquids from coming into contact with the Aluminim surface.

SIGG Water Bottles

Well, that’s it for this time gang.  Ditch those plastic bottles!

P&S