Bottled water has become a regular part of everyday life for many Americans. We drink more bottled water than beer or milk. Entire aisles at the grocery store are full of it. But are we making a huge mistake? Many of us have heard some of the logic behind why using bottled water is a bad idea. Yet we continue to purchase it anyway. Sometimes seeing the big picture laid out in front of your eyes can make things more clear. Bottled water is a huge global industry.
Experts now say bottled water is poised to pass up carbonated soft drinks in the packaged beverage market as the number one product in the United States by the end of North America is by far the largest consumer of bottled water. Numbers comparing how much more expensive bottled water can be cover a wide range.
Depending on what you purchase, drinking bottled water could be anywhere from x to 2,x more expensive than getting it from your home faucet.
The quality of the bottled water you buy is going to vary quite a bit. Much of it is nothing more than municipal water that goes through some filtration at the bottling plant. Manufacturers of bottled water are good at marketing. They use the right words to make you think their product is the purest, most refreshing water imaginable.
Remember, water filtration is something you can do in your own home if you choose. Do you ever drink Aquafina bottled water? PepsiCo recently admitted that its brand of bottled water is nothing more than filtered tap water, and the company was forced to change the labeling on Aquafina.
Check the labeling on your favorite bottled water. Most bottled water is likely safe. A recent study by Dr. William Shotyk, the Canadian director of the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry at the University of Heidelberg, found PET bottles leach a dangerous toxin called antimony into the water they contain.
The study found that the levels of antimony rise the longer water stays in the bottle. Before reaching for bottled water, Canadians need to think about the serious environmental consequences of their water choice. These include: release of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from manufacturing, transport and marketing, which contributes to global warming; depletion of scarce energy and water resources; release of toxic chemicals into our air, land and water; and absorption of poisons into the food chain.
According to the Pacific Institute, the energy required to produce plastic water bottles for the American market alone in was equivalent to more than 17 million barrels of oil and created 2. Producing bottles consumes a huge amount of water too, with the Pacific Institute estimating it takes three litres of water to produce one litre of bottled water.
It also takes energy to fill the bottles; ship them by truck, train, boat or plane to the consumer; refrigerate them; and recover, recycle or dispose of the empty bottles. The Pacific Institute estimates the total amount of energy used to provide a bottle of water to the consumer could be equal to filling 25 per cent of that bottle with oil.
Unfortunately, most empty bottles — more than 85 per cent according to the David Suzuki Foundation — are thrown into the trash. These bottles don't just disappear — they either get buried in the landfill or they're incinerated. The buried bottles take up to 1, years to biodegrade and may leak toxic additives into the groundwater. The incinerated bottles release toxic chemicals into our air.
Moreover, some of the bottles make their way into our oceans, where they break down into increasingly tiny pieces, and can enter the food chain when they're eaten by marine animals and birds. The economics of bottled water are as startling as the health and environmental considerations.
While we don't tend to think of it in this way, buying bottled water is an incredibly expensive habit: a bottle of water costs more than a litre of gasoline.
What's more, bottled water is an example of price gouging at its most outrageous. More than one-quarter of the bottled water consumed by Canadians is nothing more than filtered tap water. A nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
Why are bottled water companies targeted more severely than other types of beverages? Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one. Nothing has the potential to inspire guilt in the heart of an environmental ally like having to buy a And then when you throw that plastic away, it leaches more infinitesimal bits of itself that will never go away into the ecosystem, and that was all for milliliters of water.
It seems foolish to waste your money when perfectly good, very-close-to-free water is all around — public drinking fountains, the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink! More on this later. Why would you pay for it, and in doing so, add to the global heap of single-use plastic? Bottled water is a commodity, extracted from one place and sold somewhere else for profit.
But many activists argue that companies are not paying their fair share. There are other communities that have successfully blocked similar proposals, like Kunkletown, Pennsylvania in The fact of bottled water as a commodity can seem so criminal because it has to come from somewhere. A company is profiting by taking valuable hydration from an ecosystem, putting it in a bottle, and selling it to you.
That seems particularly unforgivable as plenty of communities, especially across the West, start to reckon with water scarcity. A single-use bottle of water is often held up as the defining example of a product that solves a nonexistent problem while simultaneously creating a new one.
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