Ahh! Here’s the really gross reason you shouldn’t reuse your water bottle

Recycling is definitely something I wholeheartedly support. For one, it helps the environment, inspires brilliant minds to create dresses from old McDonald’s wrappers and makes us feel good about reusing water bottles, except reusing your water bottle is actually gross AF.

IKR?! What kind of madness is this?! Well, according to Cosmopolitan, we’re going to have to come up with another eco-conscious way of drinking enough water. A test performed by Treadmillreviews.net on an athlete’s week-old reused water bottles revealed that the filthiest bottle out of the bunch contained more germs than a toilet seat.

Let that sink in for a minute. Your average toilet seat may very well be cleaner than a week-old reused water bottle, and I definitely just threw up in my mouth a little.

The germiest water bottle contained over 900,000 colony forming units (CFU), a far cry from the average person’s water bottle filth, which contained 313,499 CFUs. An astonishing 60 percent of the germs had the potential to cause illness, researchers found.

Thankfully, there’s a simple resolution in all of this grossness. Screw-top bottles are decidedly less germ-ridden with an average measurement of 160,000 CFUs, so use those instead of the slide or squeeze-top variety.

Happy hydrating!