Bottled Water Doesn't Make Any Sense

Q: What normally free product do Americans spend more money on a year than iPods and movie tickets?

 

A: Drinking water (bottled) - $16 billion annually.

 

Americans have a growing reliance on convenience and apparently they’re willing to pay for it. Though it may seem safer and easier to pick up a bottle of water at the gas station, or keep 24-packs of them stockpiled in your garage, this convenience comes with a huge price tag – especially when it comes to the resources wasted.

 

The Container Recycling Institute says that in the U.S., 30 million plastic water bottles are thrown away per day - 88% aren't recycled. But even if they were recycled, this doesn’t eliminate environmental guilt – tons of energy goes into producing and distributing these bottles, and then more energy goes into recycling them.

 

Production of the plastic bottles to meet our demand for bottled water takes the equivalent of about 17.6 million barrels of oil (not including the oil it takes for 37,800 18-wheelers to drive around the country delivering water every week). Around the world, bottled water consumes about 2.7 million tons of plastic each year.

 

While American tap water is among the safest in the world, Americans spend about $16 billion a year on bottled water. Meanwhile, one out of 6 people in the world does not have safe drinking water, and at least 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from bad water.

 

Quick fix: Get yourself a Kleen Kanteen or Sigg aluminum bottle for $20 and never worry about this again. The aluminum keeps water tasting awesome, and you can fill 'em up at any place that has a drinking fountain.

 

Check out more green news from RTM's Earth Tones Section.

Comments

[Water Testing Kits]

Wow that is an enormous amount of money. I find drinking bottled water pointless most of the time. Sure if I am going somewhere its convenient to have a bottle but it is just as easy to fill a reusable bottle up with tap water. Some people think drinking tap water is dangerous or unhealthy but they can just get a water test so they can confirm if their water is safe or not.