Last year no fewer than 3.5 billion plastic bottles were emptied and discarded worldwide by American travelers. In a bid to wean travelers off bottled water, the recently launched Travelers Against Plastic (TAP) campaign has linked up with Klean Kanteen and the innovative water purification technology leader, SteriPEN.

The TAP campaign, launched last week by Seattle-based travel companies, Crooked Trails and Wildland Adventures, promotes sustainable alternatives to plastic bottled water. The outbound tour operators are urging their clients to carry re-useable water bottles and a SteriPEN water purifier system as an alternative to buying bottled water when they travel abroad.

The benefits of combining Klean Kanteen’s stainless steel drink bottle with SteriPEN’s portable water purification technology are multiple. Using a reusable bottle to carry purified tap water promises to divert billions of plastic bottles from landfill, while generating significant savings for consumers.

One SteriPEN cleans 8,000 bottles of water and can be powered off either a solar battery or a hand-powered wind-up purifier, complete with a BPA-free bottle and pre-filter. The ultraviolet light technology destroys more than 99.9 percent of bacteria, viruses and protozoan cysts such as giardia and cryptosporidia.

Switching to tap water not only reduces plastic waste; the approach yields natural resource benefits in terms of ground water resource conservation and reducing the amount of fossil fuels required to transport bottled water. It also protects consumers from chemicals known to leach from PET plastic bottles into the water they carry.

For thought:

Calculations by Triple Pundit’s sustainability engineer Pablo Päster reveals the total cost of producing and transporting a one kilogram bottle of Fiji water is 6.74kg of water and 250 grams of greenhouse gases (GHG).

To produce the plastic bottle alone:

• 6.45kg of oil per kg
• 294.2kg of water per kg
• 3.723kg of greenhouse gas emissions per kg