Single-use plastic water bottles have gotten more and more popular since the mid-90s. Currently “around 380 million metric tons of plastic are being produced yearly” which is “ roughly the same as the entire weight of humanity.”  The “average person uses 156 plastic bottles per year” which is around 13 bottles a month. When looking at Union College has a population (staff and students) of around 2,500. To see how much plastic Union College uses in a year, I multiplied the amount an average person uses in a year subtract by a month to make up the loss of students in the summer to the school’s population, which gave me 357,500 plastic water bottles a year. This is an issue because 90% of plastic water bottles do not get recycled and a lot of the time they end up in landfills or oceans for up to 450 lifespans. An average water bottle has a greenhouse gas emission of 58.22 g of CO2. If we compare that to the number of water bottles used at Union college yearly that’s 20,813,630 grams of CO2. In addition, “plastic water bottles are petroleum-based. In the U.S alone, it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to meet the demands” and globally we use around “17 million barrels of oil to make plastic water bottles every year”. In the end, we should limit the amount of single-use plastic, it has a large impact on the environment, so get yourself a reusable bottle knowing that you are reducing your carbon footprint.

Work Cited:

http://www.watercooler-dispenser.com/articles/How-Much-Oil-Is-Used-For-Bottled-Water.html

https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Bottled_Water_Waste_Facts

https://www.earthday.org/fact-sheet-single-use-plastics/