Eco Fitness Trends

Health and Fitness takes aim at the bottled water industry.

Is it possible for one small fitness center to eliminate more than 10,000 disposable plastic water bottles…in an 8 month period?  If the question has you tilting your head like a Labrador Retriever, don’t worry you’re not alone.

Getting Healthy

Fitness and having a healthy lifestyle are areas I’ve begun to take serious in my life. Like many of you, I’ve now crossed the magic 40 mark and have begun to see small changes in my health and body taking root, seemingly on a daily basis.

As a water treatment professional much of my day is spent in my vehicle going to meet clients and doing site surveys with customers. When I’m not on the road the remainder of my time is spent in front of a computer screen writing proposals for customers or finding interesting things to blog about (much like this very moment).

As you can imagine, this is not what you might call an active lifestyle (albeit a rewarding & enjoyable one!).

So…what to do if a person wants to live a long and healthy life?

  • Step 1: Eat better (no-brainer…but from my experience not always easy to do)
  • Step 2: Start getting active (ditto on number 1)

Joining the Gym

Last month I decided to join the local branch of Anytime Fitness, here in Portland Maine. I fell in love with the place immediately. As gyms go I noticed right off that they do a great job of focusing on tailoring to the little things that matter to their clients.

What I wasn’t aware of was how much importance they place on eco fitness awareness.

When the manager, was giving me the tour she made sure to show me one of the gym features they were definitely very proud of: a typical wall mounted water fountain that in a couple of ways wasn’t so typical at all.

The first feature she showed me was the motion activated top fill dispenser that
automatically senses when your re-fill able water bottle is placed under the spout. It immediately starts filling your bottle for you and immediately shuts off when you’re finished. Very cool (it’s the little things that get me!).

water dispenser eco fitnessEco Fitness?

The next thing I noticed, hit a little bit closer to home for me – a digital counter on the top of the cooler that read 10,056.

The caption around the counter said: HELPED ELIMINATE WASTE FROM _ _ _ _ DISPOSABLE PLASTIC BOTTLES.

This definitely caught my attention. My mind started pushing buttons on the internal calculator. It also started me thinking about a few other details as well:

  • Like about all of the myths and misconceptions there are related to bottled water
  • How large and profitable of an industry it has become
  • How much expense we Americans put fourth each year for the luxury
  • How wasteful of a practice this can be
  • Most importantly-how easy and inexpensive it can be to make your own!

Bottled Water Facts

Regardless of your stance on eco fitness, or going eco-green, or dealing with environmental issues (not the point of the article), it’s tough to ignore certain facts that point to how costly and wasteful the practice of purchasing bottled water can be.

According to Recycling-Revolution.com Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every single hour. That’s not a typo, my friends…2.5 million EVERY hour.

That’s only the start…

bottled waterKlean Kanteen is a company that makes Eco-friendly and healthy re-usable water bottles. Following are some eye opening facts published on their company’s website:

  • People in the U.S. buy more than half a BILLION bottles of water every week!
    Enough to circle the globe twice.
  • Americans throw out 38 billion empty water bottles a year, more than $1 billion
    worth of plastic.
  • In 1976, the average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water a year. In 2007, that number had increased to an average of 28.3 gallons per person.
  • Plastic is made from petroleum. Making the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. in one year takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars.
  • On average, bottled water costs 2000 times more than tap water.
  • 1/3 of all bottled water sold in the United States is repackaged tap water!!!

If like myself, you find these statistics a bit disturbing or at minimum you’re at least a little curious as to what you can do about some of the wastefulness, check out Eco Fitness Part II.

We’ll show you 3 simple ways you can go “Eco Fit” – and possibly save yourself a bunch of money in the process!