The Capped Environmentalist!

The Lungs of the World -Amazon. Its infinite trees produce Oxygen day in and day out. But apart from giving out oxygen, the fantastic work Amazon does, is of trapping in the carbon dioxide. In today’s world with everyone trying to buy/sell carbon credits, Amazon is all philanthropic about it.

We have one more buddy on this planet, which does the same job. May not be on the scale of Amazon, but its contribution is quite significant. It’s none other than our very own Carbonated Drink. Yes the same old Black/Orange/Green liquid in our refrigerator.  Surprised? Let me explain how this belligerent Cola War fighter, plays an undercover environmentalist’s role.

You see, any fizzy drink is nothing but Carbonic Acid* dissolved into a ‘Secret Recipe’ of flavored water. And carbonic acid, H2CO3, is Carbon Dioxide dissolved into water under high pressure. Carbonated drinks contain 0.2% to 1% CO2. So your 1Ltr pet bottle would be home to 10gms of CO2. In actuality, it TRAPS the dreaded carbon dioxide!!!

One may say “Boy oh boy! You write this whole crap to tell me of this 10gms???”  So, in my defense I have my calculations ready on Microsoft Excel. Here goes the number crunching**… A flight from Delhi to Mumbai (one way only... can’t afford the round trip) would release 0.205 tonnes of CO2. Assuming a flight can carry 200 passengers, it boils down to 10250grams of CO2 contributed by each passenger. Which is approximately the CO2 content trapped by 1025, one liter bottles of carbonated drinks. Equivalent of planting 25 trees and that’s quite substantial.

But there is a catch. The CO2 is trapped in those bottles as long as the bottle is closed. As soon as you open it... Fizzz… There escapes the CO2!!!! So go ahead, buy those colas and stuff then in your refrigerator… Don’t open them though!! J

* Throwing in some chemistry to make the argument a bit more believable. 

** Reader's Discretion required: The above post is written at 3:25AM by an Insomniac. The  accuracy of the facts and figures is only restricted to the first result returned by the Page-Rank algorithm.