Winter 2011

Green Message in a Bottle By Lin Grensing Pophal

By the Numbers

When it comes to educating and informing consumers about the impact of non-plastic bottles on the environment and their health, nothing speaks louder than numbers. Allison Tryk, from EarthLust, shares the following statistics, which she recently posted on the EarthLust Facebook page.

• 80 percent of plastic bottles are not recycled.
• Plastic bottles take 700 years to begin composting.
• Plastics are the most common man-made objects sighted at sea. During a 1998 survey, 89 percent of the trash observed floating in the North Pacific Ocean was plastic.
• 24 million gallons of oil are needed to produce a billion plastic bottles.
• The United States is ranked number one as a global warming polluter compared to other large nations.
• Bottled water is the second most popular beverage in the United States.
• In the Pacific Ocean, there is a floating island of plastic trash twice the size of Texas.
• Stainless steel water bottles are 100 percent recyclable.
• Crude oil is used to make the plastic bottles as well as to transport them around the world.  Filling a bottle 1/3 full is the approximate amount of crude oil used to make that bottle.

Lin Grensing Pophal

Lin Grensing-Pophal is a freelance business journalist in Chippewa Falls, WI. She writes about marketing and business management issues for national and trade publications and is the author of Marketing With the End in Mind (IABC, 2005).