Stop Drinking Bottled Water

This entry was posted by owl and bear staff on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 1:37 pm.

The (many) downsides of bottled water:

• American tap water is among the safest in the world.

• As much as 40% of the bottled water sold in the U.S. is just filtered tap water anyway.  Be sure to check the label and look for “from a municipal source” or “community water system”, which just means it is tap water.

• By drinking tap water, you can avoid the fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants, and other chemicals that studies have found in bottled water.

• Tap water costs about $0.002 per gallon compared to the $0.89 to $8.26 per gallon charge for bottled water. If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

• 88% of empty plastic water bottles in the United States are not recycled. The Container Recycling Institute says that plastic water bottles are disposed of (not recycled) at the rate of 30 million a day.

• Plastic bottles can leach chemicals into the water if left in the sun, heated up, or reused several times.

• Production of the plastic (PET or polyethylene) bottles to meet our demand for bottled water takes the equivalent of about 17.6 million barrels of oil (not including transportation costs). That equals the amount of oil required to fuel more than one million vehicles in the U.S. each year. Around the world, bottling water uses about 2.7 million tons of plastic…each year.

• Bottled water companies mislead communities into giving away their public water in exchange for dangerous jobs.

• It can take nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle to actually make the bottle itself.

• On a weekly basis, 37,800 18-wheelers are driving around the country delivering water.

• The EPA sets much more stringent quality standards for tap water than the FDA does for the bottled stuff.

• One out of 6 people in the world does not have safe drinking water, and about 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from bad water…that we know of. This while Americans spend about $16 billion a year on bottled water

[Got2BeGreen]