Here's some information I just got from Organic Consumers that I think needs to be more widely known.
Members of the United Nations estimate that if the world took half of what it currently spends on bottled water ($100 billion annually) and invested it in water infrastructure and treatment, everyone in the world could have access to clean drinking water.
But bottled water is cleaner, right? Actually, the U.S. EPA sets more stringent quality standards for tap water than the FDA does for bottled beverages, and roughly 40% of bottled water is actually just tap water.
1.5 billion barrels of oil are consumed each year to produce the plastic for water bottles, enough to fuel 100,000 cars.
According to the Container Recycling Institute, only 14 percent of plastic water bottles are recycled.
A water bottle in a landfill or lying around as litter will take over 1,000 years to biodegrade.
What's troubling to me is that we have not even reached the consciousness of looking at this as a moral problem--but it is! Though it's probably better for you to drink bottled water than carbonated drinks, look at the real facts here. One hundred billion dollars for bottled water. Get yourself a filter, folks. Give it up for Lent! Put the money in a fund and send to off to Oxfam. Don't be proud of recycling your bottles, just don't buy it. Break your habit and do something nice for the world. It's a very little thing but it could do a lot for the world.
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Comments: 20
Anyone wanting any really good water, c'mon over!
Thanks for the wake up, Carol!
I can see it now, future archeaologists digging through our landfills finding multitudes of these little plastic bottles. What will they wonder about civilization during our time period?
In addition to the waste detailed in Carol's excerpt, you have the fossil fuels being consumed by all those planes and trucks needed to deliver bottled water to consumers.
Living in the desert, a portable water supply is something you don't send your kids out the door to school without. I put the nix on buying flats of the disposable water bottles last summer, when I found half finished ones all over the house. I bought reusable ones and pointed to the reverse osmosis spout we had installed in the kitchen. Everyone got over the MINOR inconvenience within a couple of days - and I don't need to worry about filling up the recycle can half way through the week any more!
Gisela,I know where you are coming from with the half empty bottles,those i used to water my plants or gave the water to the animals rather than throw down the drain.