No More Plastic Bottles

We have officially banned plastic bottles in our house.

This past week we have been learning A LOT, thanks to Netflix and the internet. We watched two documentaries: Flow: For The Love of Water and Tapped on Netflix and let me tell you, our eyes were opened!!

I highly recommend both of these documentaries if you want to learn more about the world water crisis and how BAD plastic bottles truly are, for the environment, for your local water and for your health.

Here is a link to FLOW and apparently you can watch it online now too here but I have not tested the video quality. The quality on Netflix was very good.

Here is a link to TAPPED and here also.

Anyways, not only learning how poorly bottled water is regulated and the fact that it mostly comes from public water sources (and not some mystical glacial stream) made us take a second look at our own tapped water, that we have been avoiding.

First of all, our local water smells BAD, its super chloriney and I didn't want the flouride. So we were going over to my in-laws house who have double filtration on their water & filling up bottles to take home for our drinking water because the chlorine taste & smell was filtered out.

After watching these shows we decided it was time to invest in a Britta water jug for our fridge. While a reverse osmosis system would be the best option, we aren't going to be living in this home for a long enough time to make it worth the extra expense so I thought I would start smaller.

But then the news brought up the whole flouride issue and I couldn't find any information about Brittas being able to filter out flouride so I was back to wondering about what we could do to drink 'un-flourided' water and I had a simple brainwave: call the water department!! Seems obvious but we're new here and I guess I wanted to know how they cared for the local water.

I received great news! While the water contains a higher level of chlorine than I hoped, it contains ZERO added flouride! Hooray! Finally a town that doesn't feel the need to medicate its citizens without their opinion! Way to go La Crete, Alberta!!

So, armed with the new knowledge that I can filter out the taste & smell of the chlorine, we ordered a nice big Britta water jug from the local homehardware which should arrive today or tomorrow!

And, seeing as we all drink a LOT of water, in keeping with my 'ditch the plastic' theme, I ordered all three of us Kleen Kanteen stainless steel water bottles.  I searched around a few of my fave eco parent Canadian online stores and found Parenting By Nature even has them on sale right now. So I got two big ones for the husband & I, and one sippy cup style for the munchkin.  If it weren't for wanting a sippy cup style one, I would highly recommend Otter Bottle - a Canadian company that sells stainless steel water bottles with some great designs & decent prices!

So hopefully our new water bottles will come this week, our Britta filter will come and we can say goodbye to toting water back & forth in plastic bottles for good.