The demons of disposable water

 

Let’s face it. We all use disposable plastic bottles, whether for soft drinks or water. I’m also sure many of use have, after the contents of the bottles have been emptied, thrown the bottles away into a nearby trash can. Why am I so sure? For a long time, these actions were just a part of my daily routine. Everyday, I used to pack a water bottle; sometimes two if I played a sport at the time, and throw them away after I had finished them. That has changed a bit with the addition of recycling receptacles at the school thanks to the Treehugger Environmental Club, but that does not solve the entire problem. Although I have stopped using disposable water bottles and switched to a beautiful and reusable SIGG bottle, that situation is not true for everyone. This is the reality: America is addicted to water bottles. But just what impact could just using disposable water bottles have on the environment? Well, if you add it up, a pretty profound one.

First off, the production of the bottles uses petroleum, already in dwindling supply due to demand for energy and other plastic products, as well as burns fossil fuels. The manufacture of water bottles burns 1.5 million barrels of oil, or enough to run 100,000 cars for an entire year, and doesn’t even count the thousands more burned by transportation.

One of the many reasons Americans use disposable water bottles is that they want to be drinking water from pristine natural environments and exotic corners of the earth. A quarter of all bottled water crosses national borders to reach its customers. Transportation from these remote and not so remote areas is one of the main factors playing into the cost of the water bottle: both in terms of cash and environmental impact. Unfortunately, for the pristine natural environments in question, bottling plants aren’t exactly the best addition into the ecosystem (Fiji, Norway, etc…). The bottling of water wastes the very resource (two gallons for every gallon in the purification process) that is being marketed, as well as depleting the aquifers, the springs, and the other sources of freshwater in the area. Those who live in the area, whether they are consumers or farmers, are the ones who have to pay the price while bottled water corporations reap the benefits.

As I mentioned in my first paragraph, recycling is not the one solution that will save us all. Plastics are never truly recycled, but instead converted to a lower form of the compound, a different object. The process of recycling also uses energy in the transportation (sometimes the bottles are shipped to China in order to be recycled) and processing, energy that could have been saved if the two other R’s of resource conservation had been followed. But don’t get me wrong, when you can’t reduce or reuse (it’s unsafe to reuse disposable plastic water bottles, as they are only meant for one use and may leach chemicals, I’ll get to this a bit later), the next best thing is to recycle. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t doing much of that either. Only about 10% of water bottles are recycled, and the rest all get sent to landfills or end up as litter, where they lay for.. oh, only about a millennium. Yep, it takes that long for plastics to decompose. 

Besides all these highly pressing environmental issues, there’s also a social issue related to this. In many developing countries, the quality of the tap water is at an unsafe level. While the people in developed countries and more wealthy people in developing and 3^rd world countries can buy bottled water, their consumption drives up the prices, and thus making the only source of safe drinking water unaffordable. Compared to the $100 billion spent on bottled water, only $15 billion is spent on public water systems.

So why not simply switch to tap? Are people simply not willing to save up to $1000 annually (yes, it’s that expensive! Tap water is approx. 1/1000^th the cost of bottled water) just by giving up bottled water, or is there another motive? Another reason Americans use bottled water is health and taste. If the former is the only reason holding you back from tap water, then there’s not much of an argument there. Much of the bottled water available today is simply filtered tap water (Aquafina, anyone?). Besides, America’s municipal water systems are much more vigorously regulated than bottled water. And if you still have worries about the quality or taste of the tap water in your area, filters nowadays are inexpensive and easy to install and/or use. There’s also the issue of migration, or the contamination of the water by compounds from the plastic after a certain time period of storage. However, this is a relatively recent scientific discovery and more research on the matter is needed to determine its magnitude and existence.

This dilemma forms the basis of my R3ICE plan, more specifically, the “I” (this stands for Inform, which I am doing right now by writing this article and will continue in the future through handouts, stickers, speeches, more blog posts, etc…). The R3ICE plan in a nutshell is pretty much me trying to convince people in my community and beyond to switch to reusable bottles, and I’ll get more in depth when the site goes up.

If you have any questions about the matter that you think I can answer or have a burning desire to debate me on a certain point, please, feel free to do so.

Below are some resources that I used and/or think that you will find helpful.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update51.htm

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/8/2/134135/1929

http://www.grist.org/advice/possessions/2004/05/04/mcrandle-bottled/index.html

http://mysigg.com/

http://refillnotlandfill.org/

http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp

http://www.epa.gov/safewater/dwinfo/index.html

http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/greentips/is-bottled-water-better.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-water14aug14,1,6295983.story?ctrack=1&cset=true