Klean Kanteen has agreed to provide us with some of their outstanding products for us to use on our trip to Augustine. With single-use plastic bottles comprising such an inordinate amount of the marine debris we have encountered to this point, it makes me wonder how much of a difference could be made if everyone immediately started using a refillable water bottle. The waste involved in these single-use plastic bottles is astounding. Even if they actually all made it into a landfill, or were recycled, instead of being discarded at random and ending up fouling some remote beach, the containers themselves would still stand as an overwhelming testament to our inability to live within our means as a species.

(The fact of the matter is that we already use Klean Kanteen bottles. We’ve been using their water bottles for quite a while now and the coffee mugs we’ll be taking on the trip are the insulated Klean Kanteen bottles… we can alternate between the standard cap and the cafe cap, essentially giving us thermoses we can drink out of. What the sponsorship means is that we’ll be able to use their larger bottles for water and food storage as well. And we are pretty happy about that!)

Klean Kanteen is at the forefront of the change that has to happen if the problem of marine debris is going to be resolved. We each need to take responsibility for what we put into the natural world as well as what we take from it. Using a refillable water bottle is a good start. It’s just an added bonus that we’ll be drinking water that isn’t contaminated with BPA and other harmful chemical compounds leeched from the bottles it comes in…