Good-bye, plastic bottles

Keeping plastic out of landfills.

(Photo by Geoffrey Whiteway, FreeRangeStock.com)

Recycling has been slow to settle in where I live. We have aluminum can recycling centers, but my neighbors and I would be hard pressed to find a recycler who would take our plastics and paper.

That means that people like me, who prefer to drink soft drinks out of a bottle, wind up throwing a lot of non-biodegradable plastic bottles into the trash, and that's not good.

According to a 2013 Huffington Post article, those bottles I've been putting into my local landfill have been absorbing "toxins that pollute our waterways, contaminate our soil, and sicken animals." And let's not forget the oil that goes into producing it. The same article urges consumers to envision a plastic bottle filled one-quarter with oil, which is about how much oil goes into producing each one. And the number of bottles I've been throwing away is not small.

I am not a casual soda drinker. On an average day, I drink about three or four 20-ounce bottles of Diet Coke, even though I know it's not good for the environment, my pocketbook or my health. I've tried on several occasions to break the habit, but I've yet to be successful.

So while I continue to work toward a soda-free life, I've decided to switch to canned soda so that I can recycle the containers, and while I'm at it, I am going to recycle other cans as well. While mining and processing raw aluminum heavily contributes to global warming — a 2010 article at RecycleNation.com states that the EPA reported that the smelting process produces perfluorocarbons that have a 9,200 times greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide does — recycling aluminum requires just a fraction of the energy.

Of course, I'd still rather just kick the soda habit all together, but until the day comes that I do, I'm going to make sure my habit does as little damage to our planet as possible.