Ever heard of the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It’s this horrendous island like body mass of plastic particles floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s larger than the size of Texas, and it’s growing. I became hyper aware of this when I was in Mexico last year, and walked down about 5 miles of beach (that wasn’t cleaned up by the hotels), and it was literally covered in plastic. I saw birds decomposed bodies full of plastic and other horrendous sights of how plastic was harming marine life.
The awful thing is that producing plastic pollutes, and then you can never get rid of the darn stuff. Once a piece of plastic is born, it’s here to stay for thousands of years. So, what can we do in our daily lives? How can we curb our plastic consumption? Obviously, we can’t really live without the stuff – it forms the fabric of our lives. Even if we chose to eschew it in our own homes, we’ll be surrounded by it as we negotiate our way through our day.
Aside from replacing as many plastic kitchen containers and receptacles with glass as I can, I think the one action that everyone can do is to stop using one-time-use plastic water bottles. They are such a waste. Only about 28% of plastic water bottles are recycled – the rest go to land fill, or make their way into our water ways and oceans. Check out the Story Of Stuff’s video on bottled water.
Advantages of buying a water filter pitcher and a reusable water bottle are:
1. You will save money! Aside from the bottles you haul back from the store, think of all those bottles that you pick up from the deli or coffee shop – very pricey.
2. You will have just as good quality, if not better quality water. If you use a Mavea pitcher, you will get great quality, great tasting water because their filters take out the bad stuff, and more importantly leave in the good minerals. Many brands of bottled water take everything out – so you are left with a “dead” water.
3. Convenience: You get to have beautiful, chilled, filtered water straight from your fridge. If you use the Mavea Elemaris Kompakt, there’s plenty of room for it.
I picked the Mavea filter over some of the other brands because its BPA-free, the lid doesn’t fall off when you turn it upside down, you 
don’t have to pre-soak the filter, and there’s a micro-computer in the lid that tells you when you need to change you filter (based on your water usage, and water hardness.) All this for 34 bucks. Grab an inexpensive stainless-steel or BPA-free water bottle, and your pitcher filter will have paid for itself in not time at all.
Post sponsored by Mavea