A 60-second PSA

Dump it before you bin it.

That last sip you leave in a bottle is called trapped water. Multiply it by millions of people and it wastes huge amounts of clean drinking water, sends recyclable bottles to landfill, and feeds toxic runoff.

Calculate your trapped water Get the facts

Captions are on by default. 61 seconds, sound on for the full effect.

Why it matters

The last sip isn't harmless

  • 💧

    Millions of gallons wasted

    Tossing out “just the last sip” of bottled water locks millions of gallons of treated, drinkable water inside landfills every year.

  • ♻︎

    Recycling gets ruined

    Leftover liquid adds weight, so sorting machines can reject recyclable bottles and send them to the trash.

  • ☁︎

    It creates toxic runoff

    Trapped water mixes with buried trash, speeding up greenhouse gases and toxic landfill fluids.

  • ⚡︎

    The energy is wasted too

    Throwing away clean water also throws away the energy used to filter and transport it.

  • ✓

    The simple fix

    Empty it before you bin it. Pour leftover water on a plant or down the drain. It keeps recycling running and protects the planet.

Trapped water calculator

How much water do you trap?

Enter how many single-use drinks you finish with a little left inside in a typical week. We'll show what that adds up to over a year, for you and for a community of 10,000 people.

per week

Not sure? One a day is 7 a week.

How we calculate this

A standard single-use bottle holds 16.9 fl oz. A typical discarded “last sip” is about 5% of that, roughly 0.85 fl oz.

weekly × 52 × 0.85 oz gives your fluid ounces lost per year (÷ 128 for gallons). Automated sorters can mistake heavy, unemptied containers for trash, so we count every unemptied container as at risk of being diverted to landfill. The community figure multiplies your total by 10,000 residents, about the size of a small neighborhood or campus.

These are illustrative estimates to show scale, not precise measurements.

Water you trap each year
309 oz
≈ 2.4 gallons of clean drinking water
That's about
39
8-oz glasses of water
Containers at risk of landfill
364
each year, unemptied containers can be rejected by automated sorters
If 10,000 people did the same
24,175 gal
and 3.64 million containers at risk of landfill, every year

The research

What trapped water actually does

1 · It scales fast

  • If just 5% of single-use bottles are thrown out with about a tablespoon (0.5 fl oz) left, that adds up to nearly 7 million gallons of drinkable water lost each year in regional municipal systems alone.1
  • Across the roughly 500 billion plastic bottles used worldwide each year, even a small leftover amount means hundreds of millions of gallons of treated water buried in landfills.

2 · It poisons the landfill

  • Methane & leachate: crushed bottles release their water into the surrounding trash. That moisture speeds up decomposition, which means more methane and more contaminated runoff.
  • Wasted energy: drinking water is filtered, purified and transported before it's bottled. Bury it and that energy is wasted too.

3 · It breaks recycling

  • Sorting errors: optical sorters and air jets separate plastics by weight. Bottles with liquid inside are too heavy, get flagged as contaminants, and go to landfill.
  • Bale contamination: unemptied containers that get crushed into bales burst open. The liquid soaks nearby paper and cardboard and can ruin the whole batch.2

The habit

Three seconds. Every time.

  1. Dump it

    Pour the last sip on a plant, down the drain, or just finish it.

  2. Flatten it

    Squash the empty bottle or can so it takes up less space.

  3. Recycle it

    Now it's light enough for the sorters to recycle.

Sources

  1. Ricova, waste-management impact assessments on liquid left in discarded single-use bottles. ricova.com
  2. WebMD. webmd.com

Global and community figures are estimates meant to show scale.

Pay it forward

Like what you see?

DumpYourDrink.org is free to watch, use and share. If it made you think twice about that last sip, please pay it forward with a donation to Kaleb’s Wish Foundation.

Kaleb was only fifteen when he asked that his life savings be used to help people in need.

Donate to Kaleb’s Wish Foundation (opens in a new tab)