The Power of Small Changes

Sometimes, you have to look at the bigger picture to see the value of certain actions. In our research for our blog, we discovered that worldwide, there are 2,822 liters of bottled water produced every second. Most of that water goes into plastic bottles. Which are added to our mountain of plastic waste and end up as (micro)plastics in the air and in our seas and oceans.

Now, imagine a single person who uses 1 bottle of 1.5 litres of water per day. She decides to buy a special carafe with filtration cartridges so she no longer needs to buy bottled water. She can filtrate her tap water instead. This way, she has reduced the global need of bottled water with 365 bottles per year.

That may seem like a drop in the ocean, but every ocean started with a first drop, so to speak. And this person has friends with whom she shares her decision (long live social media!), so that three more people take the same step. And these are people with families, so we’re talking 10 bottles per day now. And those friends also share their decision and their example with their friends and family, and thus it develops into a movement where hundreds of people quit buying water in plastic bottles and start filtering their own water. And so forth, and so on.

All I want to say is this: you are not alone. And your actions have consequences. Just imagine what the consequences were if everybody took that same decision. Would the world be better for it? Maybe you belong to the first few of a new trend… 

So go ahead and make changes for the better, even if they seem ridiculous or insignificant. Do not be fooled by that; they are not. Any action, however small, has consequences, for better or for worse.