Recycling can be important for waste management, but its importance is overstated by many people. Recycling of course consumes a lot of energy, and therefore the net benefit of recycling PET bottles is not always clear cut. Plastic that makes its way into oceans is far more of a problem than plastic that is contained within landfills. I am not saying that we should not recycle PET bottles - I recycle virtually all of mine and pick up litter - but I am saying that recycling PET bottles is not always cost effective or the most pressing environmental issue.

No they do not. At many very high end hotels and resorts guests are expressly warned not to drink tap water. A filtration system that can purify drinking water would never hadle the volume of water needed for bathing, laundry, bathroom sinks, and toilet flushes. And it would be a ridiculous waste of energy and money to use pure drinking water for those purposes, when only a tiny percentage of tap water needs to be purified for drinking. Those purification processes require expensive reverse osmosis systems, UV lights, etc... all of which consume energy.

Furthermore, I was not only talking about hotels. There are huge populations in the world whose only access to pure drinking water is through purchased bottled water. This includes billions of people who do not have the luxury of contemplating waste management or recycling, as they are worried about being able to feed their children or having clean water at all.

The world is quite a bit more complex than your Hyatt hotel room and your good ol’ reusable water bottle...