Raw materials like petroleum and gas have to be transported to plastic manufacturers to create the plastic resin, producing carbon emissions and expanding the water bottles carbon footprint in the process.
Once the plastic is produced, pressurized air is used to stretch the plastic into the shape of a water bottle. Afterward, the bottles are cooled by being placed near pipes that have cold water running through them.
By the time a bottle of water makes it to a store near you, it has a total carbon footprint equal to 82 grams or 3 ounces of carbon dioxide. Producing plastic water bottles also exhausts water resources, taking over three times as much water to produce a bottle of water than the contents of the container itself. The UN estimates that 1. Even if polluting the oceans was a worthy tradeoff for offering clean water to these nations, for the most part, plastic water bottles are not helping these countries address the appropriate issues.
In rural communities, women and children are often walking miles every day to collect water for their families, usually from streams and ponds that are full of pollutants. This limits the time they have to work, earn an income or receive an education, contributing to a cycle of poverty and illness. Those who cannot afford to feed their children or provide healthcare, cannot afford the high costs of bottled water.
Adding waste from plastic water bottles is only compounding their problems. So why do people purchase plastic bottled water? Many people prefer the taste of plastic bottled water to tap water. The irony of it is that many water bottle distributors use tap water to fill their bottles, and the truth is, tap water is better regulated than bottled water in terms of safety requirements read this article to learn what's in your local tap water.
So it seems we are letting an industry package and sell us a product that in most developed nations, we get for free. To make matters worse, these companies are producing an enormous amount of waste while selling water that is readily available in the municipal line.
Globally, we go through one million plastic water bottles per minute. Of that figure, some countries are consuming significantly more water bottles than others. The US, for example, goes through 1, plastic water bottles every second , whereas China consumes 2, bottles per second.
The glaring problem here is when you consider our respective populations: China is roughly 1. Per capita, the US is consuming far more. To no surprise, the countries that consume the most bottled water, with the highest rates of pollution, also have the lowest recycling rates.
In England, for example, free water bottle refill locations are being installed in local businesses, with the goal of having refill zones in every English town and city by Meanwhile, San Francisco has put itself on the map by becoming the first American city to ban the sale of plastic water bottles. A number of organizations are hard at work trying to clean up our oceans.
For example, the non-profit organization 5Gyres asks people to pledge not to use single-use plastics, and Take 3 , based in Australia, challenges people to leave beaches cleaner than they found them. Unfortunately, moving away from plastic water bottles has been an ongoing struggle, taking two steps back, one step forward.
For example, over the past six years, many national parks have banned plastic water bottle sales in an attempt to reduce pollution, but the Trump administration recently overturned that ban. The Starfish Story has been circulating the internet for a number of years, and though the original source is unknown, the impact of the story is worth sharing. It goes something like this:. A grandfather went to the beach with his grandson. As they walked along the beach, the grandson would stop every few feet to pick up a starfish and toss it gently into the water.
When facing a global crisis, it can be tempting to bury our heads in the sand. If we stop demanding plastic water bottles, supply will decrease. You could even use the money saved to donate to clean water projects worldwide. In addition to that, if less people are buying plastic water bottles, then less petroleum will need to be extracted from the ground to make new bottles.
All of these benefits for our environment come from a choice you the consumer get to make. So the next time you want to quench your thirst, try water from your tap — the environment will thank you. Skip to content Toggle navigation. In May , Augsburg approved a new Policy on Bottled Water that aims to reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions and support the provision of water as a human right and not a commodity. To support policy implementation as we LoveLocalWater, Fall Environmental Connections ENV students created projects to address knowledge gaps, resource needs, and communications opportunities.
Check back each week in January as we feature a blog series on different aspects of bottled water written by one of those project groups! Plastic piles up. Bottled vs Tap Water. In the case of bottled water, the analysis included the lifecycle stages of producing plastics, disinfecting and washing bottles before use, and the energy costs of filling them. Then the researchers quantified the combined environmental impacts of these production processes, in terms of ecosystem damage expressed as the number of species lost per year due to the production of tapped or bottled water , the quantity of natural resources used expressed as a dollar cost , and the global human health impacts.
They found that if Barcelonans drank only bottled water, it would significantly outpace tap water in terms of environmental harms. The lifecycle analysis revealed the ecosystem impact to be 1, times higher than that of tap water, causing an estimated loss of 1. This is likely due to the much higher costs of input materials, like packaging, for bottled water.
Ultimately, the most sustainable way to keep Barcelonans hydrated would be for everyone to drink water from taps, the researchers determined. Though, they also explored the potentially greater health risks that may come with this switch. Compared to bottled water, exposure to that carcinogenic compound THM, was higher in tapped sources, the study found.
This would also decline significantly to just 36 years spread across the whole populace, if everyone shifted to drinking tap water that had been domestically filtered, instead — which would effectively eradicate the risk.
These, the researchers estimate, would cause an equivalent of lost life years across the globe, annually. Furthermore, the plastic that houses bottled water is itself a cause for health concerns, with uncertainties about the hormone-disrupting effects of some plastic ingredients, and the still-unknown effects of microplastics that constantly shed from waste into the water that humans drink.
Understanding this in the plastic-bottle-heavy Spanish city may help us understand our complex relationship with plastic in other places too, and move us towards more sustainable consumption patterns overall.
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