Water waste
A couple years ago I took a trip through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That park is America’s most-visited park and it has a huge number of sites where you can stop and just enjoy the scenery or, let’s be honest, run across the street to put a hand lens on the rocks.
When I left that day, I’d filled up the couple grocery bags in my car with discarded water bottles picked up from the roadside and there were plenty more I didn’t have room for.
Anyone who has visited a National Park…or heck, looked at any roadside is familiar with this problem. The U.S. reportedly consumes about 30 billion bottles of water per year. Most of the plastic from those bottles winds up in the trash – less than ¼ is actually recycled – and then there’s the side of the road.