I personally feel that one of the biggest wastes of this decade is the proliferation of bottle water sales. Bottled water is one of the fastest-growing beverages on the market, however, despite it’s convenient each bottle is filled with vague and shadowy dangers to consumers, the environment and our lifestyle. The manufacture of plastic water bottles is resource-intensive, made from non-renewable resources (oil as a base for some chemicals such as HDPE, PVC, PC, PP, and PETGs), yields various cancerous emissions that contribute to global warming and further the degradation of our water quality (which feeds the marketing for buying more bottled water).
There’s been several non-credited studies and flavor tastings which with this dated ABC story showed that the worst tasting water was the most expensive and one of the best was NYC tap water (a cheap water from Kmart which is actually purified tap water won this contest):
One of the worst commercial issues with the bottle water market is the misleading advertising. What most people don’t know is bottled water is just tap water that’s either filtered or purified several more times. There’s no real benefit from drinking bottle vs tap except again the convenience and now Pepsi lost a lawsuit that now states they have to print on their bottles it’s actually tap water.
Here’s to hoping the source water is free from contaminates before hand before it’s bottled and brought to your door (Queens, NY).
Charles Fishman writing for Fast Company states:
Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave empty space.)
Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need.
Most people don’t think about the added costs to the environment bottle water bestows. There’s processing of water that takes electricity, transportation, packaging, storage and then more electricity to cool the bottles in store shelves. Here’s more on Fiji Water:
The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says “from the islands of Fiji.” Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway.
Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.
That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.
Despite all the costs to the environment Fiji is pushing their “green” stature but without addressing any real issues or stating any actual figures for production and what their actual carbon footprint is.
I applaud New York City’s campaign to encourage people to give up bottle water and consume NYC’s finest from the tap. I would love to see similar campaigns in all cites in American and the world.
Read more:
Natural Resources Defense Council – Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?
Environment, Health and Safety Online: Drinking Water Information
