The world is obsessed with plastic bottles and even in Singapore, we use about 467 million polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles a year, globally, we are looking at 20,000 bottles being produced EVERY SECOND and this number is only expected to grow at least 20% every year.
Plastic bottle production is so destructive and damaging that it requires at least 6 times the amount of water than the amount of water the vessel produced can contain, but with the rise of consumerism, it is just so convenient to grab a bottle rather than to lug around a reusable bottle; that is one of the leading causes for the huge demand of plastic bottles.
Plastic Waste
Even as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.
Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean. In Singapore, we only managed to recycle about 6% of plastic waste collected!
We should be concerned as with the increase of plastic use in our lives and the inevitable waste loss into the oceans, these plastic are gradually starting to breakdown and make their way into our food and our lives. Even in plastic bottles, there have been multiple research that found microplastics inside the supposedly clean water bottle. Take a look at a credit card that you own and imagine eating one every week!
Help Save The Planet or Continue?
Since the discovery of Polyethylene terephthalate in 1941 after Du Pont chemists developed it while experimenting with polymers to make textiles. In 1973 Nathaniel Wyeth, another Du Pont scientist, patented the first PET bottle. It was lightweight, safe, cheap—and recyclable. In other words, it was the perfect container to set the stage for the bottle binge that followed.
Now we realise that producing such bottles are so harmful to the environment and that every single action can help contribute to save or harm the environment. We here at Tami, are able to provide you with all kinds of filters and water purifiers that can be installed in your home and offices to provide you with fresh drinking water any time! Here is extremely handy tool that you can use to calculate how much money you will be saving and how much carbon dioxide emissions you are preventing from being released to the atmosphere!
Based on our calculations, with the estimated Singaporean purchase of 1 – 3 plastic bottles at $2 per week, purchasing one of our water purifiers and using it would save you $142/year, prevent 12kg of carbon emissions and save 109 bottles from going into a landfill per year!
