Quenching the thirst for bottled water with concern for the the environment.
Posted on 08 July 2009
Growing up in England I was lucky to have been born in a country where clean, safe water was tantamount to free. Many people reading this live in the U.S. a country where clean, safe water is readily available.
Bottled water may well be justified for some. Perhaps for the “Bottom Billion,” a term coined by Paul Collier an economics professor at Oxford University, referring to the most poor people on the planet? But I have never considered bottled water justified in Western developed countries where clean, safe water can be found in almost every tap.
During the last 20 years bottled water has taken off, to the point at
which it has become a $16 billion a year market. At one point the only bottled water I knew of was San Pellegrino a sparkling bottled water from Italy rarely seen, absurdly expensive – for water, and generally seen only in high end eating establishments. Today bottled water is everywhere and amazingly enough ounce for ounce, liter for liter it is more expensive than gasoline!
In 2006 we Americans used 50 billion water bottles and sent 38 billion water bottles to landfills, consuming – to make these bottles – the equivalent of 912 million gallons of oil. If laid end to end, that’s enough bottles to travel from the Earth to the Moon and back 10 times. If placed in a landfill or littered, those bottles take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade common sense leads to the conclusion that this behavior is really not sustainable (and perhaps nonsensical).
In addition, for reasons not really well understood water bottles find themselves in our rivers and oceans in a completely disproportionate degree. Beverage containers made up 18% of trash found in a 2002 litter sweep of the Hudson River (PDF, 77KB).
As for our Oceans; a "plastic soup" of waste in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said. The vast expanse of debris — in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump — is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Which brings me around to today – when both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization released a statement recommending that Americans make bottled water "a distant second choice" to filtered tap water.
Bottling and shipping water is the least efficient method of water delivery ever invented. The energy we waste using bottled water would be enough to power 190,000 homes. But refilling your water bottle from the tap requires no expenditure of energy, and zero waste of resources.
In the United States, 24 percent of bottled water sold is either Pepsi’s Aquafina (13 percent of the market) or Coke’s Dasani (11 percent of the market). Both brands are bottled, purified municipal water.
Perhaps it is time to pick up a water filter and fundamentally change our mindset, view a used water bottle as a piece of equipment in the same way we view a water glass and not as garbage. We need not go to the extremes of Jon Cotner a 26 year old graduate student who has used the same water bottle for the last four years and counting but do we really need to throw away anything that is re-useable anymore?
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