Archive of
Positive Commentaries
August 2007
Archived Positive Commentaries
Tuesday, August 21st 2007
With many Americans raising their consciousness to the detrimental effects of plastic water bottles, corporate America is starting to pay attention, according to an article by Alana Semuels recently published in the Los Angeles Times. She notes that more than 1.5 million barrels of petroleum go into the production of the 38 billion plastic water bottles Americans toss every year. "Refilling our own personal water bottle with filtered water from the tap requires far less energy and wastes almost no resources relative to bottled water," said Josh Dorfman, a spokesman for the campaign and the author of The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living. Despite the fact that corporations look only at the profitability of their products, the green options they are looking into marketing to the public—from filters to reusable aluminum water bottles—may also help the environment. Semuels writes, "Brita, which is owned by Oakland-based Clorox Co., and Nalgene, a unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. of Waltham, Mass., are two companies piggybacking on Americans' plastic-water-bottle remorse." For those who still would like the occasional convenience of water in a plastic bottle, one company, Biota, makes compostable water bottles out of plastic manufactured from corn—bottles that don’t leach ’aldehyde’ chemicals into the product as can happen with petroleum-based containers. As humankind evolves spiritually, the desire to do what is right and beneficial for the common good of all will be the motivating impetus behind all actions and undertakings. The URANTIA Book tells us, "The righteousness of any act must be measured by the motive; the highest forms of good are therefore unconscious..... [and] the consciousness of being a member of the family of believers leads inevitably to the practice of the precepts of the family conduct, the service of one's brothers and sisters in the effort to enhance and enlarge the brotherhood."