Environment is the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences. Littering, wasting food, wasting paper, pollution, wasting electricity, toxic chemicals, improper disposal, car travel, air travel, landfill, pesticides, ozone depletion, sea level rise, radioactive materials, and acid rain all harm the environment. People ruin the environment by consumerism, habitat destruction, overpopulation, fuel shortage, mass extinction, soil loss, dams, logging, mining, overfishing and many more. We neglect to realize that many of our everyday activities have a negative impact on the environment.
If your family lives in the United States, unloading the week’s groceries includes hauling a case or two of bottled water into your home. If you are going somewhere, isn’t it really easy just to take a plastic bottle of water from the fridge? But all those plastic bottles use a lot of fuels and pollute the environment. Americans buy the most bottled water out of all nations, adding up to 29 billion bottles of plastic each year. In order to make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months. Recycling plastic bottles can help—instead of going out with the trash, plastic bottles can be turned into different, useful items, just by having it recycled. Unfortunately, for every six water bottles we use, only one of them makes it to the recycling bin. The rest are sent to landfills. Or, even worse, they end up as trash on the land and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Plastic can flow into the ocean, turtles will think they’re jellyfish, eat it, and die. We may lose many species of animals if we keep this up. Water is good for you, so keep drinking it. But think about how often you use water bottles, and see if you can make a change. A single person can make a difference, and so can you. Remember this: Recycling one plastic bottle can save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for six hours.
By just recycling a plastic bottle, you can make a huge positive impact on the world. Water bottle pollution is just one of the many, many issues that the environment is going through. By recycling a plastic water bottle, you can save the animals, the earth, the environment, and make life better for you. Remember that even you, one person, can make a giant impact on the world by just recycling a used plastic bottle.
Submitted by: Eileen Guo
