Americans are blazing through plastic, disposable products at an alarming rate — as much as 60,000 plastic bags every five seconds and 4 million disposable plastic bottles every hour! These products create litter, consume resources, waste energy, and produce the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Remember to B.Y.O.B. (bring your own bag and bottle), and you can completely eliminate your contribution to this growing environmental problem.

Bring Your Own Bag

For decades, disposable bag manufacturers argued over which was better for the environment, paper or plastic. Paper bags require trees and lots of them, whereas plastic bags are made with petroleum. And that's not to mention the vast amounts of energy, chemicals, and other resources required to produce each bag and ship it to the store.

The next time you are at the store and a clerk asks you if you want “paper or plastic,” respond with a resounding “NEITHER!” Bring your own reusable bag to the store to reduce waste.

Bring Your Own Bottle

According to Treehugger (www.treehugger.com) approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil are used to make plastic water bottles every year. That's enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year; and transporting these bottles burns even more oil. In addition, it takes millions of gallons of water to produce plastic water bottles; and an additional two gallons of water must be wasted in the purification process for every gallon that goes into the bottles. What's worse, nearly 90 percent of water bottles are not recycled and wind up in landfills where they take thousands of years to decompose. Toss a reusable drinking bottle in your purse, diaper bag, briefcase, backpack, car, or bike bag to eliminate your use of disposable water bottles.