Soft drinks. Carbonated beverages. Sody pop.

Everyone knows soft drinks by one name or another, but do you know how much waste soft drinks contribute? About 131 billion cans are produced in the U.S. each year (only around 65% of those are recycled), and of the soft drink plastic bottles, only 24% are recycled. Gadzooks!

Not only that, but soft drinks, even though they cost pennies per gallon to make, cost you many times that amount. Why are they so expensive?

So you probably can figure that disposable soft drink cans and bottles are not the way to go. They waste plastic and aluminum, not to mention all the shipping and transportation for those materials. What are you to do if you want to save money and “go green”, as people are apt to say, but you simply can’t bear to be without your precious fizzy drinks?

SodaStream to the rescue. What the heck is SodaStream?, I hear you thinking inside your mind. Welp, it’s a company that sells sparkling water kits. They were charitable enough to send me a sample kit. Here it be.

What’s in the Homemade Soft Drink Kit?

• Penguin Carbonator
• Glass Bottles to make the carbonated drinks in
• Flavors
• CO² container

Basically these kits include a hand-powered machine that injects carbon dioxide into water, thereby making it carbonated. They also have a veritable cornucopia of different flavors you can put into the carbonated water, from sugary soft drink syrups to a wide variety of extracts (orange, berries, lemon-lime, etc.).

I got it about a month ago, and I’ve been making carbonated drinks just about every day. I’ve tried all the flavors I have, and there are a ton more I might one day order and try, but I’ma also try to make my own soft drink flavors.

So if you’d like to cut down on your plastic bottle and aluminum can waste, but you for some reason are unwilling to give up your beloved soft drinks, then I recommend you look into SodaStream.