Stop drinking water out of little plastic bottles which contain bisphenol A, otherwise known as BPA which is banned in Europe. BPA acts like a synthetic estrogen and is thought to cause everything from premature puberty in girls to interference with sexual development in boys. Instead get yourself some BPA free plastic bottles or a metal bottle and fill it up with your own water from home to take with you. Get yourself a filtration system for your home water or get water from a water store which is deionized and has gone through a variety of purification systems such as reverse osmosis. It's better tasting and better for you and the cost is minimal.
Buying water in little plastic bottles is bad for the environment since the corporation who provided that water extracted it out of the ground and contributed to the reduction of ground water in aquifers. These companies are known to have pumped huge quantities of water out of aquifers and have been banned in some areas. They are basically robbing the ground water from future generations whose wells will run dry sooner than they would have if huge quantities of water had not been pumped to put into plastic bottles and then hauled all over thus degrading the environment even more due to carbon emissions from trucking the water around.
And then the plastic bottles are thrown away clogging up landfills and contributing to the plastic mass in the Pacific Ocean. These bottles are made from petroleum products which are an additional envronmental burden not to mention the contribution they make to the trade deficit as most petroleum is imported. All in all water in plastic bottles is a bad way to go both from a health standpoint and from the standpoint of huge amounts of water extracted from local aquifers and trucked around thereby increasing carbon emissions. It's best to keep the water supply local and to drink local not corporate water.
The second thing you can do is to stop getting your groceries or other store bought items in plastic bags. Plastic bags are clogging up our oceans and don't biodegrade. Instead get some reusable cloth bags now sold in most super markets, and take them with you when you go shopping. Stores will bag your items in the cloth bags, and you'll be saving the oceans and landfills. Fish can become entangled in plastic bags and they're a huge waste when you consider that cloth bags can be used over and over again instead of using the throwaway plastic bags. If you buy just one or two items tell the clerk not to bag them. Instead carry them yourself without a bag. When you get to your car you can bag them yourself in reuseable cloth bags if you happen to forget to take them with you into the store. Keep a number of them in your car.
Some towns and cities are banning both plastic bottled water and plastic shopping bags. Local citizens are also taking action to prevent large corporations from pumping huge amounts of their local ground water. An enlightened citizenry can do much to not only save the environment and their own health but to save money too.
