Plastic bottles contain Bisphenol A (BPA), the chemical used to make the plastic hard and clear. BPA is an endocrine disruptor which has been proven to be bad for human health.
Plastic bottle tops are currently not recyclable, and as with plastic bags they often end up at the bottom of the sea, and in the stomachs of a variety of animal species that think they are food. One albatross that was recently found dead on a Hawaiian island had a stomach full of 119 bottle caps.
Guess what? Marine life and the whole environment suffers. Plastic bottles are made from a petroleum product known as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and they need huge amounts of fossil fuels to both make and transport them. In the 1970s the U.S. was the world’s largest exporter of oil, but now it is the largest importer. If you fill a plastic bottle with liquid so that it is 25% full, that’s roughly how much oil it took to make the bottle. For a single-use disposable item, that’s a lot.
It's a lot harder to recycle plastic bottles than you think. Of the vast numbers of plastic bottles consumed throughout the world, most of them are not recycled because only certain types of plastic bottles can be recycled by certain councils.
Most plastic ends up in landfills where it bleaches chemicals into the ground. They are found on pavements, in the park (where you want to have a nice time but can't because of the plastic!), front yards and rivers, and even if you chop them into microplastics they still take more than a human lifetime to biodegrade.
