.…You Shouldn’t Drink Bottled Water
1. Most people can’t tell the difference between bottled and tap water. Some might argue otherwise, but a simple, blindfolded, tasting experiment with your friends can prove it.
2. Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline.
3. It’s generally derived from municipal water supplies. Let’s see – buy a cheap license from a local government, pilfer their water supplier, charge a fortune for it and make a mint. Great for the bottler. Bad, bad, bad for everyone else. By the way, Pepsi’s Aquafina bottled water is made from treated tap water. Ha!
4. It’s bad for the environment. It uses a lot of petroleum to manufacture bottles. It costs a lot to ship from one part of the world to another. It costs a lot to keep cold, unlike the water that comes straight out of your tap. And it causes an incredibly huge number of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
5. Did you know that bottled water is a $46 billion industry and that it would only cost $1.7 billion per year beyond current spending on water projects to provide everyone on earth with clean water?! Stop spending money on bottled water and give the cash to water development organization or charities.
Don’t believe me? Check out more here, here and here.
Update: Earth2Tech provides a number of different eco-friendly options to bottled water. A new entrant in the bottled-water market is a company called Equa that plans to sell water sourced from Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. It will be sold as a super-premium product in upscale stores such as Whole Foods.
More: According to Business Shrink, the production of 31.2 billion liters of water for the U.S. bottled water market in 2006 took roughly 17.6 million barrels of oil. The simple break down is 3.4 megajoules of energy to produce a water bottle, cap and packaging with a barrel of oil producing about 6 thousand megajoules. For what it’s worth, 17.6 million barrels of oil is enough oil to run 1.5 million cars for an entire year.
August 27th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Perhaps I’m unusual, but I buy bottled water as an alternative to calorie-laden soft drinks. I don’t buy it because it tastes better or because I think it’s healthier than tap water. I buy it because there are very few options for obtaining tap water when I’m out and about. Most washrooms now have timed warm water, not free running cold water. My city almost never has public water fountains. I suppose I could lug around a 2L of water, but it’s heavy and gets warm and icky.
August 29th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Hey Andrea…like you, I never drink soft drinks. Good point about not having access to clean, cold water. Mmm…I’ll have to do a little research on whether there’s an insulated bottle out there. Maybe there’s a new product to be developed!