How to Be a Conscious Eater

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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