A telltale sign of someone who’s rockin’ the eco-spirit is a reusable canteen… there are dozens of different styles out there now… Siggs, Klean Kanteens, Nalgenes, etc. They’re all good in my book, but still fall a hair short on the style factor… in steps in the KOR ONE hydration vessel… the Metro Hippie’s new fave accessory! (just bought me a blue one yesterday, and I’m officially in love with a chunk of plastic!)
Damn! Never thought i’d combine the words sexy and water bottle before!
The KOR ONE is an extremely well designed vessel… clearly it is beautiful, but its functionality matches its simplistic aesthetic. Metal canteens generally have the twist off cap, which requires two hands and bit of coordinated attention. The KOR features a simple button that releases the top for accessibility. A perfectly scaled opening allows easy drinkability and ice cube potential for keeping the wet stuff nice and cold.
Now there was a scare a while back about plastic water canteens containing BPA, a chemical from the plastic that leeches into the liquid and is consumed… obviously not a good situation. The KOR’s are created BPA-free from a healthy and dishwasher safe material called Tritan.
If you’re remotely dialed into the green scene, you’ve probably recognized that bottled water has taken a lot of heat from eco-advocates… and rightfully so! It really is the perfect metaphor for everything that’s wrong with our culture! It is excessive, wasteful, expensive, polluting, unnecessary and manipulative… don’t EVEN get me started! (I think it’s too late).
Let’s break this issue down for a sec….
- 30 – 40% of bottled water comes from municipal tap water systems, so we often pay for the same water twice.
- It requires a tremendous amount of oil to make the plastic water bottles.
- Shipping the bottles around the world and cooling them uses a whole lotta polluting fossil fuels.
- The plastic in these bottles is incredibly cheap and leeches into the water that we’re told to think is safer.
- Tap water goes through more quality inspections than bottled water.
- Only about 20% of all bottles get recycled… this = 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year.
- Petroleum plastics don’t biodegrade… it will take them thousands of years to break down through photodegredation, meaning they break down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic, entering soil and water.
- Perhaps the discarded bottles will find their resting place in the oceans, where continent-sized garbage patches are appearing world wide.
- And it is ridiculously expensive! To drink the recommended amount of water from exclusively Aquafina would be $2,500 a year… the same amount of the cold and clear from the tap… $1 dollar!
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Adding all of these things up, you’d have to be borderline insane to think bottled water is a good idea!…
Enough of that… back to the awesomeness of the KOR ONE…. In addition to the obvious benefits of reusability, the streamlined H2o vessels promote a solid line of eco-initiatives as well. Each of the four available colors support a different non-profit aimed at promoting water safety. Ice blue is ocean protection, sunrise orange is container recycling, orchid pink is global water crisis and sawgrass green is watershed protection… I would have liked to support the global water crisis non-profit, but don’t think orchid pink would have been the proper image I’d like to portray in the public playground (just playin’!)…
Another cool little feature on these bottles are KOR stones, a disc shaped token placed under the cap that has an inspirational message to pump you up each time you take a drink. There’s even a blank token to write your own message (or favorite Big Lebowski quote).
All photos from Korwater.com
Wow… I didn’t think I could write this much about a water bottle! Must be a testament to how cool these things really are!… I’m certainly jazzed on mine, as this will be something that I take with me virtually everywhere. And this KOR bottle really has a world of potential… it’s such a beautiful design that it might actually make people jealous if they’re carrying around a bland lookin’ bottle of Dasani!… and I plan on adding a little fuel to the fire by making excessively loud ‘ahhhh’ sounds when I’m drinking from mine in public!
Learn more about the KOR’s and get a link to where you can buy on their site HERE…
-j
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