Have you ever thought whatever happens to your plastic waterbottle? Even if you put it into a recycling bin (which most people worldwide don’t), the plastic can only be effectively recycled around 5 times before it becomes permanent waste and… lands in the backyard of Indian urban dwellers polluting their environment and diminishing their life quality.
Moreover, this is happening in the world where billions of people do not have sufficient access to safe drinking water.
According to UN’s Millennium Development Goals, USD 10 billion should be spent each year to decrease the proportion of people without sustainable access to drinking water by 50% by 2015. To compare, USD 100 billion is spent annually worldwide on bottled water.
Money needed to deal with all the waste and pollution created by consuming bottled water diverts attention and investment from a very important issue: providing access to safe drinking water for all. Clean water should be considered a basic human right, rather than a commodity that corporations can profit on.
You can read more about why it is a good idea to quit the plastic bottles in IYNF’s “Green Toolbox” publication.
This is a post suggested by Lila Religa, participant of the Study Session “Youth Encountering Environmental Human Rights”
Environmental Human Rights 