Help the Environment

Using the istraw reduces your plastic bottle waste, lessing landfill, saving the environment and decreasing your carbon footprint by upto 2.4 tons of CO₂ Carbon emissions for a family of four.

Plastic Facts - 

• Britons still consume 3 billion litres of bottled water a year, and there lies the ecological rub, which starts with packaging. Most bottled water is siphoned into PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles.
• 13bn plastic bottles sold in the UK last year, just 3bn were recycled.
• 27m Tonnes of plastic used to bottle water worldwide each year.
• 9,000 Tonnes of CO₂ produced each year taking Volvic the 1,000km from south east France to Britain. Evian travels 930km from Lake Geneva, producing 14,000 tonnes of CO₂. British supplier Highland Spring produces 5,500 tonnes of CO₂ per year.

Landfill - Where does all the plastic go?

• Almost 90% of domestic waste in the UK goes directly to landfill or dumping sites to be levelled and covered with earth.
• This costs about £1 million a day.
• Once the rubbish has been covered the organic matter starts to rot down producing methane, an inflammable gas, which makes its way to the surface.
• Landfill waste remains a potential environmental hazard.
• These are non-biodegradable plastics and cause problems in waste incineration since many of them give off poisonous gases when burned.
• In landfill sites where toxic industrial wastes have been dumped indiscriminately, the land can become poisoned and unsafe for farming or building.

The plastic bottle - How does the plastic bottle damage the environment before you have even had a drink?

• As Green recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum feedstocks.
• It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) just to manufacture a one-litre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions (10 balloons full of CO₂) per empty bottle.
• Extrapolate this for the developed world (2.4m tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year) and it represents serious oil use for what is essentially a single-use object.
• To make the 29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world's biggest consumer of bottled water, requires more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year.