3 Things You Do That are Surprisingly Harmful to the Environment

Are you outraged about global warming and pollution? Are you always expressing your concern on social media, complaining about fracking, nuclear waste disposal and the like? Well hold on there, Brave Revolutionary. What if you found out that you were already doing things harmful to the environment and were totally unaware of it? Would you be able to change your lifestyle to go green? If the answer is yes and indeed, if this spirit of humility and cooperation could go global, the world could might finally be saved.

The process starts with simply understanding our practices and demands that contribute to the problem. Let's start by considering three ways that you are probably already contributing to environmental decay without knowing why.

1. Drinking Bottled Water

Bottled water is largely a scam, since it's mostly tap water that's been filtered with ultraviolet light, then overpriced and packaged, and put inside an unsafe drinking receptacle. The biggest problem isn't even the poison contained inside—the phthalates, microbes, benzene, arsenic and so on...

The worst part is knowing that every purchase goes towards polluting the environment in ways we cannot easily reverse. According to some sources, from doctors and environmentalists, bottled water is extremely wasteful. Bottles that are used to package water will take literally a thousand years or longer to bio-degrade. If they are burned they produce toxic fumes. Guess what happens to 80 percent of our bottles after we drink that precious tap water? Straight to litter. Furthermore, it takes almost two million barrels of oil to meet the demand of bottled water, just for the United States. As we really prepared to invest in filtration and stop “fueling” the fuel industry?

Statistically speaking, The International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) has warned us that we are increasing our bottled water consumption, since consumption of bottled water has increased by 6.2 percent and bottled sales increased 6.7 percent. The US is now using well over 9.67 billion gallons. That means the average American is drinking over 30 gallons of bottled water each year.

2. Wasting Water

The American pastime of flushing your toilet is no longer such an enjoyable notion, despite how funny sitcoms make it seem. The truth is we all have a water shortage and aside from running the tap or boiling too much water, one of the worst offenders is over-flushing the toilet. An alternative would be using compost toilets or even just flushing the toilet fewer times per day. For example, rather than waste your urine in the toilet, pee outside if you live in the country. You can even store urine and use it as a fertilizer. You can even add a brick to the cistern and reduce the amount of water that each flush uses.

3. Overusing Electricity

The average household uses far more electricity than is necessary, and this means electricity is making 40 percent of all US CO2 emissions. Some commonly wasteful practices include leaving computers on constantly, leaving lights on all the time, leaving appliances plugged in when they're not in use and having the air or the heat on all the time can only add to the constantly growing demand.

A spokesperson for www.FiltraSystems.com says this is precisely why the Green community is pushing the issue. “High water and energy demand means we have to make concessions in other areas of life, including harnessing oil. Not only is the ideal to switch to better renewable energy sources but also to decrease electricity usage and water usage with smarter lifestyle choices.”