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Everyday swaps

Refillable bottle instead of bottled water

A single reusable bottle used daily replaces hundreds of PET bottles a year, and its impact becomes negligible over a year of use whatever it is made of.

Swap out
Bottled water
Swap in
Refillable bottle and tap water
Impact
5 / 5
Cost
2 / 3
Effort
1 / 3
Grams of plastic avoided per person per year
2500
Break-even
A A$15 bottle pays for itself after 5 to 10 bought bottles
Watch out for
Making an aluminium bottle takes a lot of energy, about 13 kg of greenhouse gas emissions, as much as roughly 45 single-use bottles. It only pays that back after a couple of months of daily use, so buy one and keep using it.

Buy one bottle you will actually carry, stainless steel, aluminium or a tough reusable plastic, and fill it from the tap or a fountain. Stop buying single-serve water unless tap water is unsafe where you are.

A 2025 study in Environmental Research found making one aluminium bottle emits about 13.1 kg CO2e against 0.28 kg for a single HDPE bottle, but over a year of drinking a litre a day the reusable bottle vastly outperforms the 730 PET bottles it replaces, and the yearly impact of a refillable bottle is negligible regardless of material. A 500 ml PET bottle weighs about 12 g, so four bottles a week avoided is roughly 2.5 kg of plastic a year.

The catch: the bottle only wins if you use it. A drawer of abandoned reusables is worse than the plastic they were meant to replace.

Page updated 24 September 2026. How we check sources