Getting Real with Shadra Bruce
Recently, my husband and I decided to go bottle free. I’m not talking about baby bottles, we’ve been free of those for a couple of years now, I’m talking about bottled water.
There’s been a push on lately to stop buying bottled water because more of the empty bottles end up in landfills than in recycling bins. Although this is a great reason to go bottle-free it’s not the main reason why my husband and I decided to do it. We’re going bottle-free to keep more of our money in our pockets. We did a rough calculation and found that we spend somewhere around $150 a year on bottled water. That mightn’t sound like a lot spread over the course of a year but we also have a Brita water jug that we use and buy filters for. Why have both? It seemed redundant to us, so we bought a reusable metal water bottle for each of us and stopped buying bottled water. We’ve noticed a big difference already and it’s only been a month or so. It’s shaved a few dollars off our weekly grocery bill and the recycling bin doesn’t fill up so quickly.
This little venture into being bottle free has inspired me and now I’m planning on trying to go plastic free. I want to slowly replace all my plastic food containers with glass ones and I’m looking into buying reusable snack bags for lunches instead of buying sandwich bags all the time. The $150 we save on bottled water will probably be invested in going plastic free but I think it’s well worth it. We’ll end up saving more than that in the long run. This is definitely a win-win situation; we save money and there’s less garbage being sent to landfills.
We switched to no-waste lunches and food containers earlier this year, and it’s great. We use Pyrex to store dinner leftovers, and we stopped using plastic bags, sacks, and foil for lunches. We’ve really cut down on our waste, and I feel a lot better about not using plastics to hold our food.