Will Banning Plastic Bottles Help?

Ellah Marie M. Florentino

Let's first travel back in time to the Naliyagan festival. During that time,
my friends and I went to a convenience store, and I chose an expensive French brand water
bottle to buy. I can even remember the cashier telling me that the water bottle I’ve picked out
was quite expensive, as if indirectly questioning whether I could afford it. So here’s
something I noticed about this: us humans, when purchasing plastic water bottles, do not only
care about safety but also about the desire to appear classy, not weighing the detrimental
effects of this on the environment.

Short-term convenience on the one hand, long-term threat to the planet on the
other. In fact, studies conducted by researchers reveal that humans use 1 million plastic
bottles every minute! And if you believe that recycling can solve this issue, I have news for
you. Less than half of the bottles purchased in 2016 were collected and recycled, and only 7%
of those were transformed into new bottles. Instead, the majority of these bottles end up in
landfills or in the ocean.

To address this enormous problem, lawmakers, activists, and consumers are grappling
with the question: Will banning plastic bags help? If we think about it, plastic does not truly
break down or biodegrade; it just disintegrates into smaller and smaller pieces over time.
But now I’ve got to admit, going into this story, banning plastic bottles to help save the
environment felt like a no brainer to me. But the more we looked into it, the more we
realized it wasn’t so simple.

To start with, in many areas of the world, clean drinking water is only available
due to the miracle of single-use plastic bottles. I mean, even in the U.S. look at Flint,
Michigan. They’ve had a literal state of emergency for years now due to lead contamination
in their drinking water. If we live in Flint and we had to choose between plastic water bottle
or drinking contaminated water, we’d probably opt for bottled water.

However, researchers predict that by 2050, pound for pound, plastic in the ocean
will outweigh all the fish. Now let’s take a moment to think about how much plastic that is…
That’s a lot of plastic.

So remember that tap water is free, and assuming it's safe to drink in your area,
why not invest in a trendy, reusable water bottle. So the next time you reach for a bottle to
quench your thirst, always opt for an ecofriendly one.