No More Bottles: KT puts its money where our mouth is

In the month of March this year, Khaleej Times ran a #KTforGood campaign wherein we declared a #WarOnPlastic, encouraging our readers and associates to ditch the plastic menace as much as possible. Plastic bags remain the biggest culprits, and we would keep encouraging individuals, institutes, and businesses to look for greener, more sustainable alternatives.
But if one were to create a hierarchical list of harms, right after plastic bags will be plastic bottles and caps. The single-use water bottles may look harmless but they are nowhere near so. According to research by Citigroup Global Perspectives & Solutions, PET bottles are the third most common item found in ocean debris, equating to about 15 per cent of total marine waste. And the world produces 500 billion units of PET bottles each year. That's about a million bottles produced - and sold - every minute of every hour of every day of every month of the year. And of the whole lot of litter that we produce, hardly 14 per cent is ever recycled.
To put our money where our mouth is, Khaleej Times has collaborated with the UAE-based No More Bottles to install an organisation-wide drinking water filtration system so as to do away with the need for bottled water. The UAE has one of the highest rates of bottled water consumption in the world, and we'd like to do our bit in making an admittedly small dent in that statistic. But we'd put a dent for sure.
And while organisation-wide implementation of such a scheme took some time after we decided to ditch plastic bottles coinciding with the campaign we ran in March, such a move is obviously much simpler and faster to execute at homes. There is a host of available alternatives, including home water purifiers, that can be installed in a couple of hours if not a few minutes, which will do the job and wouldn't cost the earth. Not going green will cost us our earth.