Commemorative Water Bottles
In honor of Northwestern going green and the designation of our Nature Center as a National Wildlife Habitat, we will be selling commemorative Northwestern Goes Green! water bottles. These 28oz bottles are being designed just for us and will sell for just $2.00 each. Students have until April 22nd to pre-purchase a water bottle. Any remaining water bottles will then be sold to community members.
Please help support our efforts by purchasing a water bottle. They are on sale at Northwestern Elementary and will also be available at the Community Earth Day Festival on April 28th.
We also hope to have re-usable shopping bags as well.
Please help support our efforts by purchasing a water bottle. They are on sale at Northwestern Elementary and will also be available at the Community Earth Day Festival on April 28th.
We also hope to have re-usable shopping bags as well.
Statistics
Water Bottles
Americans will buy an estimated 25 billion single-serving, plastic water bottles this year. Eight out of 10 (22 billion) will end up in a landfill.
1.5 million barrels of oil is used annually to produce plastic water bottles for America alone - enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.
A growing problem: "In 1990, Americans bought 1.1 billion pounds of plastic in the form of bottles, according to the Container Recycling Institute. In 2002, they bought more than three times that - 4 billion pounds."
Like all plastic, these bottles will be with us forever since plastic does not biodegrade; rather, it breaks down into smaller and smaller toxic bits that contaminate our soil and waterways.
Along with plastic bags, plastic bottles are one of the most prevalent sources of pollution found on our beaches.
.Plastic Bags
Americans will buy an estimated 25 billion single-serving, plastic water bottles this year. Eight out of 10 (22 billion) will end up in a landfill.
1.5 million barrels of oil is used annually to produce plastic water bottles for America alone - enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.
A growing problem: "In 1990, Americans bought 1.1 billion pounds of plastic in the form of bottles, according to the Container Recycling Institute. In 2002, they bought more than three times that - 4 billion pounds."
Like all plastic, these bottles will be with us forever since plastic does not biodegrade; rather, it breaks down into smaller and smaller toxic bits that contaminate our soil and waterways.
Along with plastic bags, plastic bottles are one of the most prevalent sources of pollution found on our beaches.
.Plastic Bags
- 100 million plastic bags a week go to landfill.
- Plastic bags can take between 15 and 1000 years to break down in the environment.
- Each year, an estimated 500 billion - 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That translates to over one million per minute.
- North America goes through 110 billion plastic shopping bags annually.
- Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways polluting our soil, rivers, lakes and oceans.
- Production of plastic bags requires vast amounts of oil.
- Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.
