What a lotta bottles! Time to change with a new refill scheme.

How do you save 99 quid ? Fill this 100 times.

How do you like your water?

Bottled or straight from the tap? What about when you are camping? Do you buy large bottles or fill up from the camp site tap?

I know what I prefer, and it doesn't come with some fancy schmancy label, a whole bunch of hype or an advert with roller skating babies. It comes out of the tap and it costs just a couple of pence for a litre. It's also the best drinking water in the world. And no, that's not marketing spiel, it's true. In the UK our tap water is the best there is anywhere in the world and is tested every single day for quality. How often does your posh drinking water get tested once it leaves the bottling plant, travels hundreds of miles to get to you and then sits on the supermarket shelves for weeks?

Why would you spend a pound or more on bottled water when it's available so freely - and when it's so good? Because you don't like the taste of tap water? Get over yourself! I used to work for a director who would only have her tea made with Evian. Yes, quite. We used to pour tap water in an Evian bottle, show it to her and then make her tea. Did she ever notice? Of course she didn't.

Even if you worry about our water or have a hypersensitive palate then you could always buy a filter. They cost about a tenner, with cartridges about another tenner on top. That's equivalent to around 20 litres of 'posh' bottled water. Each cartridge lasts for a month or so. If you drink a litre of water a day that'll save you using 30 plastic bottles each month and are already saving £££.

Why does it matter anyway?

Did you know that the UK disposes of 10 million drinks bottles each and every day. It's a lot of bottles. Add to that fact the news that only around a third of single use plastic bottles get recycled. That means around 6.6 million plastic bottles are being thrown away every single day. Where do they end up? Mostly in landfill, which isn't ideal when you consider we are running out of oil. You'd think we would do all we can to conserve it wouldn't you? But no. The drinks industry wants us to use single use bottles because it's cheaper for them to produce, cheaper to transport and therefore makes them more money. Also, they are resisting a bottle deposit scheme to help tackle this awful, scandalous waste.

The bottles that don't go to landfill

What about the bottles that don't make it to the recycling plant or to landfill? It's pretty simple what happens to them. They lie by the roadside. They end up in rivers. They end up in the sea. They end up on the beach. And, if they don't end up on the beach then they stay out at sea, attract toxins and become toxic themselves, they pollute our oceans, break down into micro plastics, get eaten by wildlife and pollute our food chain. That's what. I have picked up thousands of bottles from beaches near where I live. And I am just one.

A unique scheme to save bottles

Where I live, in Bude, a new scheme is about to begin that aims to reduce the number of bottles going to landfill and the ocean. It is also a fundraising scheme for a fantastic local amenity, the Bude Sea Pool. The idea is very simple: you buy a reusable canteen from the Sea Pool, then you go and fill it up at cafes and restaurants in the town that display the refill sticker. No hassle, no questioning why you aren't buying anything, nothing. Just a smile, a free refill and lovely cool, clear, Cornish tap. Love it. We need more of this.

For more about the Sea Pool, CLICK HERE.