Water (Bottle) Logged: New water bottle trends each year create large amounts of waste and defeat the purpose of reusable water bottles

Scrolling through my Instagram feed, I came across a video of a girl tipping over her extensive collection of Stanley cups with twenty of the exact same tumbler in different colors.

That video was my breaking point: new reusable water bottle trends each year create large amounts of waste and we should stop following them.

The purpose of getting a reusable water bottle is to… reuse it. They’re designed to be washed and used as many times as possible. There’s no point in having more than a few.

If the reason for buying multiple bottles is the different colors, a less wasteful way to achieve design or color variation is to add accessories. Adding stickers and charms to your water bottle or mixing and matching lids is a more beneficial option than buying over five water bottles, and will save money as the accessories cost around $1 per sticker and less than $10 for charms, compared to the bottles which are $45 each.

When reusable water bottles were first popularized, the goal was to decrease the application of single-use plastic. Even though water bottles now are made of metals and ceramics that aren’t as harmful to the environment, it’s still wasteful to have a collection of water bottles where more than half aren’t being utilized. Most of the time they still end up in the trash after a few years of use.

Each school year there’s a new over-hyped, coveted brand of water bottle that every high schooler has to have. First it was Hydro Flask, then Stanley and now possibly Owala. 

This only fuels the waste factor — alongside the new brand trends people end up with a backlog of water bottles from previous years’ trends that end up gathering dust in the back of a rarely-opened kitchen cabinet.

If purchasing water bottles is your favorite pastime, I encourage you to find a different hobby. It’s far less wasteful to buy around five different brands or styles of water bottles that you like and can be cycled through the week — any more than five is crossing the line. 

No one is looking at your Nalgene water bottle from 2015 and thinking, “That’s so weird, they don’t have the brand new limited edition Stanley.” 

Reusable water bottles were created with the intention of producing less waste and lowering the cost of water bottles in the long run. Let’s stick to a reasonable amount of water bottles and ignore the pressure to buy into short-lived water bottle trends.