| TimJim Jr |
03-21-2010 04:55 PM |
[quote] Why Water Bottles Will Not Be the End of the World
The Environment is a beautiful place, full of some of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring things imaginable. Who would want to destroy such a creation? Certainly man is quite capable of this feat as shown by his ability to create weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear warheads and neuro-toxic gases that could decimate the planet in a millisecond. Yet with these items laying around all over the world, what are we more worried about destroying the planet with? Water bottles.
Environmentalists have been doing an extraordinary job making sure that plebians such as myself are extremely aware of the current state of the Earth's ecosystem for many years. If not for them, we would not have devised ways of getting great fuel economy for our vehicles, much less realised that panda bears are becoming few and far between. But for some reason, they also choose to pick small and petty battles on top of these urgent and important issues, and one of these topics happens to be water bottles.
Water bottles are made of a type of thermoplastic polymer resin called Polyethylene terephthalate, or PETE for short. PETE is mostly used to make synthetic fibres, where it is then called Polyester. Polyester accounts for over 60% of the worlds PETE, while PETE used for beverage containers such as water bottles accounts for only about 30%. PETE is durable, yet lightweight, and has thousands of uses in the food industry. When PETE is used for water bottles, they use very little material in comparison of soda bottles, therefore making them more disposable and much cheaper to the consumer.
This seems reasonable, since you are already paying far too much per gallon of water when you buy bottled water than from the tap, so if the company uses less material it would cut the cost by quite a bit. Since there is such a small amount of plastic, most people (myself included) simply throw them into the garbage bin and continue to live our lives. According to environmentalists, we are slowly killing our beautiful planet and all that live on it.
For some reason, environmentalists got the notion that plastic takes millions and millions of years to dissolve and become one with the earth and all the soil where it was left. In reality, this in not the case. While it is true that plastic is infernally stubborn when it comes to decomposition, it still would only take about 10 to 20 years to decompose under about 15 feet of soil, while it would take around 400 years to decompose if left in water. Since most landfills are MUCH deeper than 15 feet (according to the Ecology Department of the State of Washington they tend to be over 300 feet deep and be quite dense, 700lbs/yd.), the increase of pressure on top of the water bottles made of PETE would simultaneously increase the temperature. This increase of pressure and temperature would kick-start PETE's decomposition process and would shorten the decomposition phase from 10 to 20 years to about 2 to 8 years, depending on the local climate and average rainfall/temperatures. This is drastically different from the millions upon millions of years that we've been hearing so much about over the last few years.
[/quote]thats what i got so far
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