Have you been consciously shopping lately and had a close look in the supermarket? Probably not, because we always tend to go to the same supermarket and shopping is more of a routine because you already know where everything is. That is completely normal. The next time you go shopping, walk carefully through the supermarket. But do not be scared. It will be lurking on every corner: Plastic. It does not even stand out anymore that everything is packed in plastic. Even the organic cucumber is wrapped in plastic and you can hardly save yourself from plastic bags in the fruit section.

But what can you do to avoid unnecessary plastic packaging without much effort? One of the solutions is for example: Refrain from PET bottles. Drinking plenty of water is important and healthy. The problem is that most of the time it is bottled water, even though tap water in almost all industrialized countries is qualitatively better than bottled water. The quality of tap water is checked at the moment when the water comes out of the tap. Bottled water is checked before it is bottled. What happens on the way to the bottle or what happens afterwards in the bottle is not checked. Bottled water is one of the biggest marketing tricks of the century, because manufacturers make us believe that bottled water is healthier than tap water. So why are we still struggling with heavy six-packs and paying around 250 times more for the bottled version?

93% of the PET bottles are recycled. Unfortunately recycling is not the solution to the problem. For the production of new plastic bottles only 25% of the old bottles are reused. The rest is shredded and processed into plastic flakes. As a result it loses quality and is processed into garden chairs or carpets. And these are rarely recycled. They end up in the landfill where it takes more than 1’000 years to mine. In the meantime the rain washes the small plastic particles into our groundwater and into our ecosystem. The other option is the waste incinerator. Burning produces energy but the vapors are poisonous and damage the earth’s atmosphere. For the production of one plastic bottle 100 ml of oil are needed. With the annual water consumption of the USA and the oil needed for bottle production, you could drive one million cars for one year.

Every day 22’000 tons of plastic are disposed of in the seas. Plastic waste is also carried by wind, floods and rivers (also from offshore regions) into the sea. If we do not change our habits, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by the year 2050. It is very difficult to avoid all plastic packaging, but everyone can just take a first step and refrain from using plastic bottles.

(Source: Pauline Seiler – www.trademachines.de)