Making sure you’re staying hydrated and drinking enough water every day is crucial to maintaining a healthy body and mind. But it’s just as important to think about where your water comes from. If you’re buying bottled water, it’s essential for the environment, the oceans, and future generations, to recycle every single-use plastic water bottle.

The key to successful recycling

Recycling is now more important than ever. Over the years, more resources have been put into our councils, allowing them to collect and recycle more items from every UK household. From food waste to clothing, glass and paper, there’s not much that you can’t leave outside in your kerbside recycling boxes ready for collection.

But most importantly, it’s plastic water bottles that are key to successful recycling. According to the government-supported and funded, Recycle Now, the national recycling campaign for England, there’s an estimated average of 35.8 million plastic bottles used every day in the UK, but only 19.8 million are recycled.

That means a staggering 16 million single-use plastic bottles, as well as water bottles, find their way into every other place except the recycling plants, including landfill sites, waterways, and oceans.

Resource conservation

These figures show why it’s so important to recycle every plastic bottle you use, especially water bottles as they’re still so widely used around the world. Almost everything we use takes precious natural resources and raw materials from the earth, including trees, oil, gas, metal, and water. This makes recycling essential in helping to conserve what we have.

And when it comes to plastic, besides not using them at all, recycling old water bottles is the best thing we can do. To start with, it means we need to create less new plastic as “​​over 99% of plastic is made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels” according to ciel.org. But crucially, recycling means we can protect all forms of wildlife and different ecosystems around the world.

But when you recycle your water bottle, it also saves energy. Recycling Bins says “Recycling a single plastic bottle will save enough energy to power a lightbulb for three hours or more”. And recycling saves money too with Friends of The Earth quoting that “it’s 6 times cheaper to dispose of recycled waste than general refuse."

Sustainable hydration with Thirsty Work

So while recycling is clearly the best option for many of our everyday waste items, it’s clearly plastic water bottles that matter most. The most effective way to give ourselves and the planet a helping hand is to use less. But we can all do our best to reduce, reuse, and recycle whenever we can.

For sustainable alternatives to plastic water bottles, read our 3 easy tips for more sustainable hydration using a reusable water bottle and one of our bottled water coolers or mains fed water coolers. Suitable for every office or workplace, even if you’re working from home, every cup or bottle refill delivers great tasting, pure-filtered water.

Now’s a great time to try a water cooler for you or your staff with a 10-day free trial. Just call the Thirsty Work team on 01392 877 172 or email at hello@thirstywork.com and we’ll get you started today.