Here's Manjula, Shannon and Douglas at our last Vermont Woods Studios staff meeting.  I'm happy to note they all have re-usable water bottles in hand (although they're all making fun of me for taking a picture of it).

Anyway, as part of our Earth Day Green Up Your Workplace Challenge, we're trying to persuade you to bring a re-usable water bottle to work instead of buying drinks at the vending machine.

Here's a couple reasons why:

• This year more than 25 billion disposable, single use plastic water bottles will be sold in the United States alone (that's 2 million every 5 minutes!) and more than 80 percent of those will end up being disposed of rather than being recycled

• Over 1.5 million barrels of oil were used to make thees plastic bottles-–and that doesn’t include the petroleum used to transport them. That’s enough petroleum to power 100,000 automobiles for a year!  (Dave Chameides discusses these and more reasons to give up reusable bottles at Care2.com)

So even though we can transform disposable, single-use plastic bottles into beautiful Polywood outdoor furniture like the recycled plastic Adirondack chairs we're sitting in here, there are still 22 billion bottles that end up in landfills or polluting our oceans every year.  Check out this video on ocean plastic pollution to learn more.  Then be sure to attend (virtually, of course– it only takes a mouse click) our Green-Up Your Workplace Challenge on Facebook and see if you can persuade your co-workers to give up disposable plastic bottle for good!

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