The Perfect Water Bottle for Travellers from Water-to-Go
September 8, 2014When I’m travelling the one thing I am constantly buying is water, some countries you can’t drink tap water and others just don’t have a good supply of free water. So what would you say if I said I had the answer to this problem?
Before I introduce to you my answer lets talk about the excessive amount of plastic bottles which are being used to keep us hydrated while on our travels. I remember sitting on a beach in Thailand – a place where you cannot drink tap water so are constantly buying bottled water – and seeing a row of bottles washed up on the shore. I would stumble across the plastic rubbish at least once a day. Countries who don’t have drinkable tap water often don’t have a recycling system for plastic bottles (plus backpackers get lazy), that is a lot of waste for landfill. Thailand certainly is not the worst country for this but it is a country I have experienced it in, along with the rest of South East Asia.
To give you an idea of the problems with this plastic here are a few facts from the Water-to-Go website.
- Over 70 billion (seventy thousand million) single use plastic water bottles are consumed annually in the US and Europe alone; National Geographic estimate that a maximum of 20% are recycled. That means that over 50 billion bottles go into landfill or end up in our oceans every year.
- Unless it has been incinerated, every piece of plastic ever made still exists; Reason? Plastic takes over 500 years to degrade!
Why are we wasting so much plastic and money on water when we don’t need to?
My answer is the Water-to-Go bottle, a 750ml bottle with a specially designed filter inside. It is effective on a lot of water and the list of contaminants it catches is long. However the only thing it will not work on is salt water. Each filter will last for 200L of water (or for three months if you don’t use it much), just think how much water that is! With a quick sum that means you can fill the bottle 266 times, I find that pretty insane.
When I travelled through South East Asia this bottle certainly would have been my best friend, I don’t drink a huge amount of water either so one filter and bottle would have lasted me the six week trip. Instead I bought at least one or two big bottles of water a day, with each of those bottles heading to a landfill somewhere for 500 years.
It isn’t just in countries where you can’t drink tap water that this little beauty comes in handy. I love roadtripping but how many times have you left the house with out a water bottle. How many times have you thought you’d pop on a little hike only to have a little bit of water left in the car. Driving around Scotland over the last 10 months I have had this problem several times, I climbed Ben A’an with basically no water because I was not prepared. Had I of had a Water-to-Go bottle with me I could have filled up from one of the many streams, rivers or lochs that Scotland has and been well on my way. However on my final Scottish road trip this is exactly what I did…
We were on our way to Fort William when I pulled over in a car park on the edge of Loch Lomond to fill up my bottle for a test. Now Loch Lomond looks pretty fresh and clean, but I still wouldn’t drink the water from, so I figured the water was a good enough to test the bottle on. I filled the bottle up and then let it soak for a while (as per instructions on first use). A little later we found our selves stuck in traffic in a hot and sweaty car. Did we have water left? No, as per normal we hadn’t packed enough and out came this little thing I had filled up earlier. The water tasted… well normal and there were absolute no side effects, that you could have gotten if the water was dirty. Fair enough this wasn’t the hardest test for the filter but you only need to read the reviews by others who have used it in India or South America or even at festivals in the UK.
The Water-to-Go bottle is brilliant in my eyes, it can help you abroad or on a road trip in your home country. It saves you money and stops you from buying plastic which ends up in landfill and best of all you don’t need to be near a shop to get water. This piece of kit is certainly going to be packed with me on every trip from now on and I think you should give it a go too.
A Water-to-Go bottle costs £24.95 which includes one filter
Replacement filters cost £14.95 for a twin pack.
Disclaimer: I was provided with a free bottle for the purpose of this review, but all opinions are my own and I wouldn’t recommend a product I wouldn’t personally use.
