The most dangerous thing about a plastic bottle is the idea that it’s already made.

That was my logic. For years. When I bought water at airports, from dhabas, from those men on Delhi footpaths who sell counterfeit Bislehri like they're smuggling cocaine.

One of my exes didn’t agree. She lived in CR Park, carried her own steel bottle, and looked at me like I had slapped her veganism every time I paid 20 rupees for a plastic bottle.

Her argument was sentimental. Mine was scientific. I explained that the bottle already exists and buying it doesn’t magically increase the number of bottles in the world.

But that’s not how causality works.

We fought about it once in Dharamkot. Again in Dubai. Eventually, we broke up. It wasn’t because of the bottle but it didn’t help.

A few days back, I stumbled upon a fact that ruined my own argument. Most bottles don’t get recycled into new bottles. They get downcycled, broken, melted. Used to make tiles, benches, maybe road fillers. But never reborn. Just reused. Until one day they disintegrate into microplastics. And then?

They travel.

To the bloodstream of cows. To rainwater. To snow on Himalayan peaks. To placenta tissue. Which is poetic. Because the child arrives second. The bottle is already there.

So yes, my logic was correct.

The bottle was already made.

But so was the mistake.

This is what nobody tells you. Recycling is not a moral rinse cycle. It’s a managed scam and an aesthetic burial. The plastic never vanishes. It just migrates. From intention to inconvenience. From product to particle.

And you know what the biggest scam is?

They’ve convinced you that waste is a character flaw. That the burden of a global supply chain failure is your problem because you chose the wrong bottle on a Tuesday.

We don't live in a circular economy. We live in a boomerang economy. Everything you discard returns. Thinner. Smaller. Invisible. But sharper.

Now when I see a plastic bottle, I no longer ask what it costs. I ask where it will go. Who it will enter. What organ it will betray. Possibly my own.

I wish I could call her and say, “You were right.”

But she’s probably in Goa now. Still drinking from her steel bottle. Still judging.

Somewhere, a goat in Ghaziabad is coughing up the final proof of my argument.

DAMN.