Don't bottle it Up

from an article at Leeloo.com

Don’t Bottle It Up

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Dale

Ever wondered what the appeal is with bottled water?  Why do we spend over 100 billion dollars on bottled water each year?

It undergoes less quality control and scrutiny than tap water, so it can’t be the quality.  It costs approx 1000 times more per litre than high quality tap water, so it’s not the price.

According to industry marketing experts we are buying bottled water simply for convenience,but at what cost?

In the United States alone, bottled water is responsible for the consumption of 17 million barrels of oil per year.  This same amount of oil is enough to fuel more than 1 million gas guzzling cars and light trucks for a year.  To compound this, the environmental impact caused by the production, distribution, storage, and disposal of bottled water is alarming.  Australia’s bottled water consumption creates more than 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, as much as the annual emissions from 13,000 cars.

Don’t turn away now, it gets worse.  Australians only recycle 36% of their PET bottles. This is a shameful figure and means that around 373 million plastic water bottles will end up as waste each year. I don’t even want to get into the discussion about why we import bottled water from around the globe (Fiji, France, Britain) while exporting our own brands of water in return.

So next time you’re listening to someone rant about the price of petrol, maybe point out that their strange bottled water fetish is driving up the price of fuel, so do they really have the right to complain about it?   Or if you are a know-it-all who is always giving others grief about their impact on the environment (like me!), maybe trade in your bottled water for a more permanent option before someone catches onto your hypocritical ways.

Source credit :: The Pacific Institute

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