Are you about to go on your jog? Don’t forget to grab that water bottle from the fridge: “Mm, nice and cold”. You jog past the grocery store on your way back and think: “I need to buy eggs and bacon”; you go into the store. As you make your way through the (not so packed) early Saturday morning crowd, you spot the trash. You toss out your bottle. Did you think twice? No. After all, why should you? Your sweaty paws were wrapped around that thing for an hour. What use would it be to you?

In the grocery store, getting what you needed was easy; finding what you wanted was a breeze as well. It always seems as though the closer you get to the register, the more stuff you seem to want: new edition of Cosmopolitan (hmm, J-Lo cheats; Brad talking to Jennifer again? This should be good… I NEED it!), you glance to your right and see a Twix bar, you immediately grab it… Twix never requires much thought. When you finally get to the clerk, you find yourself with a lot more items you wanted instead of needed. The strawberry-color haired boy at the register barely looked at you as he asks: “paper or plastic?” You think about it for a second. Why not- “Both please,” you tell the boy. As he wraps your plastic bag into your paper bag, you wonder what will happen to those bags once you toss them into the trash. Oh well, “no one else thinks about the environment… why should I?” you whisper to yourself.

Well you are wrong! Plastic waste ruins our Eco system. I’m sure most of us are fully aware that plastic is not good for our planet. It starts with one dump at a time. I mean after all, it’s not a banana peel- it’s a man-made plastic bottle! There is no way for it to decompose into the Earth. The amount of plastic that is deposited into our Pacific sea is ridiculous! You would think it would be okay to use these bottles when we recycle them, right? Well apparently not. Jeff Bennett, a Multimedia Developer at Digital Splash Media was given an assignment to produce a slide show of facts that he researched on plastic waste. Bennett found that only 10% of water bottles are recycled, and even then, not all the materials of the plastic are reused. Most of the materials are shot back up into our atmosphere. Hmm, I’m sure the birds love that fresh smell of plastic in the air: after all, “70-100% of North Pacific birds are affected by this,” Bennett states in his slide show. “Those poor birds,” is all I can think right now!

Remember that beautiful beach you like to visit every summer? The one with the beautiful clean water and majestic seagulls flying past that calm any nerves that you may have had all winter long. Do you remember that wonderful feeling of the warm beige sand under your toes? Well imagine if that was all taken away. What if you stepped onto your beach and noticed that it was all different. The ocean was no longer blue… it was dark and musky now. The only seagulls that were around were the ones that lie dead a few feet away. And let’s not even get started on the sand that you once loved, because it too was no longer the same. It was now filled with trash. “How could this have happened? Why?! Who would let it get this out of control?!” you angrily ask yourself. Take another look! You notice that most of the trash around you is plastic… why? Well that’s because that’s the plastic that has been coming onto shore from the ocean. I came across a helpful article titled Plastic Bottles & Ocean Pollution which helped me learn that it really is not easy to keep up with the cleaning of these beautiful beaches when 120,548 bottles of plastic are being pushed onto oceans as well as landfills every minute? Yes, I said EVERY MINUTE! And no, it’s not easy. That’s 63.4 BILLION a year. That’s twice the size of Texas. Did you hear me? TEXAS!! That’s huge!

Well I could go on all day talking about the negative effects this stuff has on the Earth, but why don’t we take a look at how it is affecting us financially. When it was time for the good folks at Statistic Brain to get their annual stats on plastic water bottles, they found that Americans usually spend over $15 billion on them yearly. If you ask me, I think that is just too much money… wouldn't that almost be like we are paying to pollute the world? Why spend all that money when you can just purchase a reusable water bottle and a filter to leave in your work space and home. After all, tap water costs 240 to 10,000 times less than buying water bottles. Wouldn't that just be logical to just reuse ONE bottle? Imagine all the things you could buy with the money you will be saving, like a new flat screen TV or that iPhone that you have been dying to upgrade to.

Sure, it is always much easier to just go to the store and buy 24 bottles of water instead of refilling bottles. After all, it is not just easy, but also very cheap… or at least it just seems cheap. You can purchase a 24 pack of Ice Mountain water bottles from Walmart for only $3.99! Yes, that may seem more than worth it for the price you will be paying, but not if you think about it in a different way. Couldn't we say that buying those bottles would come pretty close to buying a $5 pack of cigarettes? I mean, of course not EXACTLY the same, but fairly close. When you buy a pack of cigs, you are a couple steps closer to lung cancer, right? Well when you buy a pack of water bottles, our entire world is another step closer to its death as well. I am certainly not someone who thinks of themselves as above the rest. I am just as guilty of buying, using, and throwing out plastic bottles as the next gal, but man, did my research put that all to a halt.

You could turn away from this thinking that it isn’t all really a big deal and that you’re simply one person who cannot change the world, but I just don’t understand why. Why would you want to continue doing something when you know that you are part of the problem? Why not become part of the solution? Think about how much you use plastic… nothing coming to mind? Okay, let me give you a hand: computers, cell phones, cars, bed frames, signs, chairs, etc. Almost everything we use is either made up of, or held together by plastic. We were accepting enough to welcome plastic into our homes as easily as the computer and the television. Now that we understand how much we need it, why would we ruin it all together for the rest? We need to keep in mind that our planet can easily live without us, but we cannot live without it.

We are simply human; nothing more and nothing less. Our label could sometimes set our boundaries. We either think of ourselves as God’s greatest and most powerful creation, or we just settle for being another species- not better, nor worse than any other. Wouldn’t you say that we only seem to ever forget our strengths when it comes to something we fear we will fail at? How would we know we will fail if we don’t try? All I ask is for you to take a few seconds and think about what I have said. I am not asking for your money or for you to do anything that will be of much effort to you. I just want everyone to see my point and feel my passion for the Earth we live on. After all, we should not be so selfish. Our planet gives us all that we need for survival. Why can’t we just give back to it?