I recently came across this fourteen minute CNN piece on Midway, the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” There’s a line towards the end where he picks up a floating, trashed water bottle and says, “It’s clear- the trash from your quick, convenient gulp can end up anywhere on earth and last forever.”
As a part-time boxer, I used to carry a water bottle to my desk job, in the interest of hydration. If I wasn’t hydrating all the time, I wouldn’t be able to fully perform athletically. I somehow lost this habit, I think because I was grossed-out by the cleanliness of the bottle. I could never get the sipping mechanism fully clean. I’d notice mildew building, and wonder how long I had been ingesting it. I gave up on a reusable bottle. I went back to branded water, buying a bottle per drink.
A few months ago, I started participating in a part-time yoga teaching certification. For eleven weeks, 23 of us met in a studio space on Saturdays and Sundays from 9am-6pm. This space was bare, only having some bolsters and a couch. One of the first tenets that we learned in the program was the Niyama “saucha”, which is the inner observance of cleanliness. We noted that this can also be applied outwardly in how we respect the cleanliness of our environment. We had a person designated every day to double check that the space was left perfectly cleaned before we left.
Throughout our days, we had several breaks. Students would regularly use break time to grab a snack or meal. With 23 people each having three opportunities for consumption per day, I’d estimate the the accumulated trash was a little over 55 gallons per day. One large and one small garbage can, both full. Water bottles and coffee cups made up the majority of this.
Although we left our space clean, I can’t get the image of that trash out of my head. I remember that someone even remarked that it was amazing how much trash we made in one day. And I thought- if this is a visual representation of how much trash 23 people make in one day, this is essentially how much trash I make on my own in 23 days. If most of that is made of water bottles and coffee cups, there’s an obvious first step towards change.
Climate change is a scary, huge thing; but, small things that we do every day add up. A coffee in the morning, a drink at lunch, a coffee in the afternoon, and a water with a workout- it adds up. If I can put a tiny bit of effort to change only an aspect of these consumption habits, the impact is actually quite great. If 80% of that 55 gallons was made of bottles and cups, I could accumulate 44 gallons of this type of trash in 23 days, or 698 gallons of trash per year. Visually, this is about 50 full sized kegs.
I’d rather do the (minor) work to find myself a water bottle that’s easy to clean than picture myself shipping 50 kegs of trash off to paradise.