Health

Bottled Water’s Environmental Toll

The cost of wasted resources and damage to our “Blue Marble” is immeasurable with the loss of groundwater, creation of toxic emissions from plastic (production, waste & destruction), and pollution from transporting the bottles. We need to be accountable now, or we will be putting future generations and our planet on life support.

Carbon Footprint of Bottled Water

• 86% of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter
  Source: Earth Policy Institute
• A bottle that takes just 3 minutes to drink can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade
  Sources: Earth Policy Institute, As You Sow, Container Recycling Institute
• The energy used each year making the bottles needed to meet the demand for bottled water in the United States is equivalent to more than 17 million barrels of oil. That’s enough to fuel over 1 million cars for a year
  Sources: Earth Policy Institute, As You Sow, Container Recycling Institute
• Importing 44 million gallons of bottled water to New York area ports from the European Union and Fiji in 2006 created nearly 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide — the amount 790 cars emit in a year
  Source: Cornell University, Chronicle Online, August 22, 2007
• More than five trillion pieces of plastic are already in the oceans, and by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish, by weight, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation
• Most plastic bottles are made of oil-derived (non-renewable resource) polyethylene terephthalate PET, which generates more than 100 times the toxic emissions in the form of nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide & benzene than the same amount of glass bottles
  Source: National Geographic’s Green Guide- Berkeley Ecology Center’s Task force
• Bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide
  Source: Waste Management World, The Pacific Institute
• The total amount of energy used to produce, transport, refrigerate, and dispose of a plastic bottle of water may be as high as the equivalent of filling a 1-liter bottle 1/4 full of oil
  Source: Waste Management World, The Pacific Institute