is why in countries where tap water is clean, safe and cheap,
people buy and drink expensive and environmentally unfriendly bottled water, photograph Robert Smith/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo, the shear cost and waste that bottled water creates is mind blowing, in the US
alone water bottle manufacturing takes 1.5 million barrels of oil every year -
more than it would take to power 100,000 homes, and that is without the fossil
fuel or emissions costs of transporting them to shops,
from the article,
‘Tap water is thousands of times better for the environment
than bottled water, according to scientists. In fact, it takes three times as
much water to produce a plastic bottle as it can hold, this might not come as a
surprise but researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health
(ISGlobal) have crunched the numbers to work out just how much better
it actually is, the research focused on Barcelona, Spain which is home to
around 1.35 million people - nearly 60 per cent of whom consume bottled water
at least some of the time. The ISGlobal study found that if every resident in
Barcelona switched to bottled water, extracting the raw materials would cost
more than €70 million and lead to the loss of 1.43 animal species every year, this
would be 1400 times more of an impact on ecosystems and 3500 times higher cost
to the environment for resources, than if the whole city were to drink tap
water instead’
remember the next time you buy a bottle of water, you are a big part
of the problem, please drink tap water instead and help save the planet.
2 comments:
We hate plastic bottles. We installed a RO unit on our kitchen tap and refill glass bottles to take with us when we leave the house. A large amount of USA entitlement food stamps given out to the poor are used to buy water due to lack of knowledge about what they buy. Most plastic bottled water provided by soft drink companies is just tap water passed through a simple carbon filter to enhance taste. We believe the main reason for bottled water is it is a convenient way to pack water from the house to work or trips. Most public and many businesses do not provide enough working drinking fountains so people end up packing water as a routine habit. They do not consider the downstream pollution they create.
Sad deal, and most world oceans are full of these bottles…John and Alley
Dear John and Alley, it is a sad fact that most people, certainly in the UK that buy bottled water could use water out of the tap, the quality of tap water here is good, it is also a sad fact that so many bottles that the muppets buy never find their way to a recycling plant, and as you mention it is so easy to bring a refillable bottle with you on trips, but I guess few will listen and less will do so! best regards, Stan and Diana.
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