A message in a bottle... of a different kind!

Did you know that...

Each year, 250 billion disposable plastic bottles are consumed globally. Of these, only 24% is recycled.
In Greece, we consume 400 million plastic bottles of bottled water annually.
8,000 plastic water bottles are thrown away in the garbage every second.
151 billion barrels of petroleum and 22.5 million tons of CO₂ are required for the manufacture of plastic bottles every year.
200 billion dollars are spent annually all over the world for the purchase of plastic water bottles.
Plastic objects that are thrown at sea, are disintegrating into very small particles, so that the particles of a one-litre plastic bottle can “travel” around all of the world’s beaches.
Plastic bottles are ranked 4th in the category of the largest quantities of waste matter found in Greek beaches for the time-span between 2004 and 2014 (63,210 pcs).
1,000,000 seafowl and 100,000 sea mammals die every year from plastic waste, while plastic and fibres found in the intestines of fish are likely to be consumed by man when eating them.

10 largest quantities of waste in the sea (Greece, 2004 - 2014)	(pcs)
1. Cigarette butts	565,438
2. Bottle caps/lids	83,539
3. Straws	68,689
4. Plastic bottles	63,210
5. Aluminum soft-drink cans	37,916
6. Plastic bags	33,490
7. Food packaging	19,851
8. Plastic packaging lids	11,161
9. Plastic covers/packages	11,159
10. Plates/cups/cutlery	9,849

Disposable plastic bottle consumption is very wide-spread in our country, as is the environmental imprint that they leave when we are done using them. A quantity of these ends up in landfills and some end up polluting the environment and, principally, the sea and only a small quantity is recycled.
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- We reduce consumption of disposable plastic bottles and replace plastic bottles of mineral water with canteens of filtered faucet water
- We recycle the bottles that we can't avoid buying.
- We participate in the voluntary cleaning of beaches (for information, visit www.helmepa.gr)