Student Full Speech 08: Kelly Nantz, Message in a Bottle

Hi. I'm Kelly. I live in Glenwood, Iowa, which is right next to the Mills County Landfill. I visited this landfill and asked the manager to show me around, and I asked him what goes into it and how it works. I found out that this landfill literally takes tons of trash every day from Mineola, Malvern, Hastings, Glenwood, Tabor, Silver City, Henderson, Council Bluffs, and Pacific Junction. Your trash probably goes into this landfill. Now, think about the things that you throw away. I bet you throw away a lot of things that should be recycled. How about plastic water bottles? How many of those do you throw away a day? How many do you throw away a week? You probably don't even know. You probably never thought about it before. But it's time to think now. Today I want you to think about what you are paying for these plastic water bottles, what happens to them when you're done, and how they are damaging our environment. Let's start with the costs. Recently, water bottle companies have revealed their sources, and it turns out that 40 percent of water sources are actually the same as tap water. Average cost of a bottle of water is $1.50 in the store. In the article All Bottled Up by Jodie Manger, she reported that when you buy a water bottle in the store, you are paying 240 to 10,000 times more for a product that is free. The global grand total spent on water bottles is 100 billion U.S. dollars compared to the $15 billion spent globally on clean water sanitation. You're paying at the pump for these plastic bottles. Gold Coast Bulletin reported in 2007 it takes 63 million gallons of oil each year just to make the water bottles used in the U.S. This is enough to fill 100,000 cars for an entire year. You'd think that since we spend so much money on these bottles, we would be putting them to good use. That is not the case. Michael Nimmen reported in 2007 that the U.S. uses about 29 billion plastic water bottles a year and 85 percent of those bottles end up in landfills. Other bottles are incinerated or burned. The rest end up as litter that will eventually make their way out to drain systems and eventually into our oceans. So what's all this wastefulness doing to our environment? Plastic water bottles are photodegradable, meaning that they need light to decompose. When they are buried in landfills, it can take up to 1,000 years for them to decompose, and even then, they break down into smaller molecules. Those molecules are there forever. Incineration of water bottles releases greenhouse gasses into our environment. This contributes to problems of global warming. According to the National Resource Defense Council, about 9,700 tons of carbon dioxide gasses are released into the environment during a shipment of disposable water bottles. The National Academy of Sciences reported about 6.4 million tons of plastic trash is making its way into our oceans every year. There, it gathers in ocean currents called gyres. The largest ocean gyre is the North Pacific gyre. It has been nicknamed “the great garbage patch” because it literally is a great big patch of garbage in the middle of our ocean. It is twice the size of Texas, and it's filled with plastic trash as far as the eye can see. Now that you have had time to stop and think about what the use of plastic water bottles is doing to your cash flow, where they really end up, and how they are damaging our planet, I hope that we can all use this information to reduce this wasteful habit by turning on the faucet instead of opening a bottle because your trash does not disappear when the garbage men take it away.