We tried wherever we could to minimise our use of plastic - this included plastic water bottles, of course.
Have you ever thought of how many tourists there are around the world at a given time? And how many plastic bottles are thrown away each day as a result? (We'll not mention the numbers of people in countries with perfectly good drinking water coming out of their taps who prefer to buy bottled water....)
Just to give you some idea: if you take a 2-week holiday and drink the recommended 2 litres a day of water, you will be using 56 small 500ml bottles. For a family of 4, that would make over 200 bottles thrown away!
What's more, in many countries, there simply isn't aren't any facilities to reuse or recycle plastic bottles and they will end up being thrown in landfill or even being burned, with a huge associated environmental impact.
As we planned to travel for over a year, the number of plastic bottles we would have consumed would have been just enormous, in the thousands. We didn't want to produce this much avoidable waste in order to hydrate ourselves, so here's what we did instead:
1- We carried reusable bottles, for example flasks and we refilled them whenever possible
In countries where drinking water is not available on tap, you don't have to buy lots of bottled water to be safe. We asked what the locals were doing and often found a practical option - most people don't buy the expensive plastic bottles, they either buy drinking water in bulk (in reusable hard plastic whater-cooler type bottles), have their own filter they are happy to share or are happy to boil up some water for you to filter yourself.
For example, in India, many families had filters fitted to their tap. It looks a bit like this:
So, in homestays and guesthouses you can ask to buy a few litres of their filtered water. Most people refused payment and were just happy to provide some water - especially when we explained why we wanted to avoid buying plastic bottles.
In Thailand, some hotels had a 'water cooler' fitted with drinking water cylinders. Again, just ask to refill your bottles. This is what they look like (although they don't always come with the lovely pink cover):
We came across another brilliant solution in Thailand: the pay-as-you-fill drinking water machine! Look out for them in towns and cities. This is where you can refill you big 6-litres bottles.. or your little ones if you're just passing through. It's safe (osmosis + filtration, treated) drinking water at a very cheap price (sometimes 1 Baht for 1 litre) and available in the street. You can just refill your bottles at these machines - great! It's also fun and rather refreshing in a 'street shower' sort of way when you go for the first time and you don't know that you can stop the flow of water by pressing the green button... :o)
And, if all the above fails, for a fully independent solution, there are all-in-one filters you can try - allowing you to use tap or even river water directly without boiling it first! This is the one we carried with us: the Aquapure Traveller from BW Technologies.
It works using iodine contained on the outside ot the filter and the water is drawn through the filter as you drink it, removing impurities and the iodine taste.
This is Harriet showing off our filter bottle:
Water Usage
The other thing we tried to do in terms of water was to reduce our usage as much as possible. There's just not a lot of the stuff around - in India there were constant power cuts due to shortages, people were walking miles to collect water and using such small amounts as a result, it seemed amazing after a while that we ever have enough spare for a bath!
So, we tried to use as little as possible and drew on all the advice we get at home - turning off the shower while you soap, turning off the tap while you clean you teeth (we even went one step further and used a little cup of drinking water for teeth cleaning, safer when travelling and so little water) and in India there was always a bucket and a jug for a 'bucket bath', and sometime no shower anyway. It's all worth a try and makes you really aware of how much we waste at home...
Another thing we tried to do was not to heat water more than necessary - it's been hot everywhere we've been, except in the mountains and sometimes there's just not a heater anyway, so you get used to a refreshing cold or cool wash in the day time... no hardship involved!
The last thing we tried to do was to use biodegradable/ environment friendly beauty and laundry products, especially in places where we knew the waste water was going straight back into nature without going through a waste water plant... This was easier at the beginning as we brought some products from home. They're harder to get hold of once you're away though, so we had to try just to use less to reduce the damage.
