Page 176 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

at most $200, and with an exchange rate of $15 for your 60-liter
carbonation cylinder, you’re looking at 25 cents per liter—tops.
That’s one-fourth the price of an average liter of grocery store
seltzer, meaning a savings of at least 75 cents a pop.
If it’s plain water we’re talking about, consider the feel-
good reward of your individual action: Each time you hydrate
with a glass of water versus a plastic bottle of water, you’re
conserving 2,400 calories of energy involved in producing that
bottle. That’s a whole day’s worth of food for someone.
But if you have to choose a drink in a single-serving con-
tainer of some kind—plastic bottle, aluminum can, or glass
bottle—choose glass. It does the least damage to the planet.
Ditto damage to you and others. Here’s how the rest stack up.
In the most holistic environmental sense, plastic is by far
the worst container option. (OK, Styrofoam is actually the
worst, but it’s so bad that it shouldn’t even be under consid-
eration.) It takes a lot of water to make a plastic bottle, and a
lot of oil, and because it takes so many years for the bottle to
degrade, it leaches toxic chemicals into the environment if the
bottle winds up in a landfill somewhere (usually in low-income
neighborhoods, already burdened with higher rates of chronic
illnesses). It likely never gets recycled, especially in the United
States, where we recycle a mere 9 percent of all plastic waste.
Incinerators can pollute the air of the communities where
plastic gets sent to be recycled. (To learn how plastic also
wreaks havoc on aquatic communities, see “#StopSucking” on
page 167.)
Cans are better, but not by much. The raw material behind
your average can is bauxite ore, which requires a lot of energy
to refine and has been found to leak toxic and ugly red mud
residues, which can contaminate surrounding water sources.
Dams built for hydroelectric power to process the aluminum
can disrupt the biodiversity of the area and displace local

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