Most people don’t think about it, but the way we spend our food and beverage dollars has a huge impact on our planet. The global food industry at $4 trillion is one of the largest and most important industries worldwide. The way food and drink is grown, processed, packaged, transported and disposed of, can support our goals and values, or, not.

Every week most of us go to the supermarket and vote with our dollars for food and beverages that don’t always reflect our value system. We want to be healthy. We want our children to be healthy. We want our planet to be healthy. But we support many companies whose practices would make our skin crawl if we had the time to really look into it.

Beverages are arguably the most important piece of the this picture. Our bodies are 70% water. These fluids need to be continuously replenished. Until the middle of 20th century, most people around the world drank water, either from the tap or from natural sources. A beverage with flavoring was a special treat.

The beverage industry grew dramatically by selling products that were cheap to produce (made mostly of sugar, chemicals and plastic or aluminum packaging) and spending big on marketing. 1985 was the first year that soft drink consumption in the U.S. surpassed the consumption of tap water. Since then, the beverage industry has continued to grow.

Its time for a change. The beverage industry wastes billions of tons of packaging materials. Bottles and cans are cluttering up our landfills and littered all over our highways. The beverages that most Amiercan’s drink are known to contribute to obesity and are suspected in a large variety of other disorders.

Vote with your dollars for a new way of drinking. Filter your own tap water, put it in a reusable container and add flavoring at home. If everyone in America did this, billions of tons of packaging waste would be saved and billions of gallons of fuel would be saved in transportation.

The little changes we make, sometimes are not so little. It’s time to rethink what we drink.