It takes a lot of oil to make water bottles

~ It takes the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil just to make the plastic bottles for our bottled water consumption in the U.S., says Dr. Gleick, who worries that our demand for bottled water puts pressure on our energy resources and contributes to our dependence on foreign oil.

(a report from CBS news)

How can we keep doing it?

The evidence against the use of plastics for ANYTHING disposable is now overwhelming. Plastics are made from oil. Oil is a resource millions of years in the making and that has been largely used up in just 100 years. Once oil is out of the ground, no matter what you do with it, it is a problem. This can manifest as an oil spill – and the Gulf of Mexico is just the “Ben Hur” of something that goes on every day. It can be when we burn the oil and create air pollutants and greenhouse gas. It can be when we make petrochemical fertilizers and basically “mine” our farmland, leaving it dead and depleted after a few years. It can be in polymers and plastics, which are used for a very short time and then break into tiny particles that, asbestos like, dissipate throughout the environment causing damage in ways we will never know – that prize understanding will be for some distant future generations, who will also have the task of cleaning up or trying to live with our mess.

So how, knowing this, can we keep doing it? How come we are so perverse, so “easy going” in our treatment of the only place in the universe where we can have a life? What stops us using just a little bit of our personal energy and doing whatever it takes to NEVER buy throw away plastics? Because that is what it takes. That is what we need to do, much more than just “get through the day.” More than pay the mortgage, more than cope with another emergency. We need to understand very clearly the difference between what is urgent and what is important. It is important to stop using plastic throw away bottles. Really simple. It is important to take that understanding and slowly expand it to apply to other forms of plastic, and then other unnecessary but “easy” uses of oil. It is important to see, we are just the dust of this earth, made into humans for a little while, and then all our molecules will rejoin the dust again.

This is our earth. We are it, and we are killing it. It is important to stop this self abuse.

Tap Water – get something real into you.

Bottled Water is a Symbol of Modern Day Consumerism. A Symbol we Don’t Need.

from an article in uncluttered white spaces

Bottled water is simply an indulgence for western culture, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. The USA alone are moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks. Picture this, that is the same as 37,800 full size trucks delivering water a week. Water is heavy, so heavy in fact that you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave quite a lot of empty space. Yep, ouch!

Fair to say, that one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. So our global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. Lets repeat that… “NOT ONE OF WHICH WE NEED!

A chilled plastic bottle of water in a shop fridge is the perfect symbol of modern day consumerism and the laziness for western culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, ignorance for health related issues and environmental problems.

OK, it’s just a bottle of water, I can hear you saying so what, this has no impact compared with the indulgence of driving a bullet proof Hummer. A whole industry has been created to supply us, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Brazilians, Kiwi’s… any nation for that matter with safe drinking water something that we dont actually need. And we keep on buying it.

We buy bottled water because we think it’s healthy. Which it is, of course: Every kid who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a bottled of Coke is in-arguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn’t healthier, or safer, than tap water. Its the same thing. Its just water. Consider this… If the water we use at home cost what the cheapest bottled water costs us, then our monthly water bills would run around $9,000.

Considering half the price of a typical $2.00 bottle goes to the retailer. Around one third goes to the distributor and transport. Another 15 to 20 cents is the cost of the water itself, the bottle and the cap.We are just lining pockets. Chris Guillebeau wrote an article that saving $2 a day will take you anywhere you want to go in the world within 2 years. Most people I know spend a lot more than that on bottled water and complain they cant afford to go anywhere for their holidays. Maybe they should subscribe to Chris’s insanely good blog.

The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says “from the islands of Fiji.” Take a trip to the source of that water, and you realize just how amazing that promise is. From New York  it is an 18-hour plane ride west (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway. Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it. What a joke.

We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year–in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.

Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice. Once you understand the process and resource used to create and deliver the bottle of water, ask yourself this question “Does the $2 I am about to spend equal the impact I’m about to leave behind?” Especially when your kitchen sink is available every morning ready to refresh.

Simply asking the question takes the carelessness out of the transaction. And once you understand where the water comes from, and how it got here, it’s hard to look at that bottle in the same way again.

Jackson Browne: I Blame bottled water for the oil spill!

..According to the scientists 'and activists' estimate, the amount of oil used to produce plastic every day is the same amount as the oil that is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every day...

read on below:

from an article in MailOnline

by  JACKSON BROWNE

Last updated at 8:46 AM on 12th July 2010

I was struck the other day by a comparison made on 5 Gyres, the blog site of scientists and activists who are working to draw attention to the growing concentration of plastic pollution in the world's oceans. 

According to the scientists 'and activists' estimate, the amount of oil used to produce plastic every day is the same amount as the oil that is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every day from the damaged Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. 

And they point out that the plastic ends up in the same place – the ocean. So that means that we are the spill, or a spill of similar proportion to the uncontainable, disastrous spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Earth song: Jackson Browne is passionate about protecting the planet

Last year my touring production company decided to eliminate plastic water bottles from the list of things we are provided in the venues we perform in. Now we carry two five-gallon coolers, and each of the band and crew carries a stainless-steel water bottle. 

On our buses we use Brita filters. My production manager estimates we save between 200 and 250 bottles each show, and up to 96 bottles every day on the buses. We are one of several tours that we know of who are making these kinds of changes. 

There are also some venues and festivals that are eliminating single-use plastics. Living in Los Angeles, I had long believed that having one's own sealed water bottle was safer than trusting the municipal water supply. 

My children grew up drinking from plastic water bottles. But not long ago I heard a radio programme that dispelled that myth, and a few others, including the viability of recycling all the plastic bottles produced every year.

Most of the bottled water sold as spring water in America is, in fact, tap water. There don't seem to be any legal barriers to selling what comes out of a pipe in New Jersey or Los Angeles as spring water, or mountain water, or Arctic water, at least not in the United States. 

There is far more quality control of American water supplies by municipalities than is exercised by the companies that bottle tap water and sell it to us for as much 200 times its value. 

As for the designer water that is shipped from Fiji or France or Sweden all over the world, using jet or diesel fuel – this only adds to the amount of oil that is used by the plastic bottled water industry. 

It takes one third of a bottle of petroleum to manufacture a single plastic bottle. Add to that the cost in petro-miles of shipping it around the world and you have what is still accepted as a legitimate business expense, though it may eventually be seen as a crime. 

The amount of oil used to produce plastic is the same amount as the oil that is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged Deepwater Horizon drilling rig

Getting people to accept the premise that only the water from pristine and exotic locations is truly clean may be a marketing triumph, but it is a human health disaster. 

The health issue with plastic bottles is that they are made with Bisphenol A or BPA, a known 'endocrine disruptor', which can mimic the body's hormones and can have side effects. 

BPA is used to make the plastic hard and clear, and it was developed originally as a sex hormone drug until that use was discontinued for reasons of human health and safety. 

BPA leaches out of the bottles into the liquids they contain, in amounts that are claimed to be safe by the plastics industry. But last year experts from five universities – London, Plymouth, Reading, Stirling and Ulster – urged the British Government to review BPA. 

In a letter to the then Health Secretary Andy Burnham, they wrote: 'The major body of research and evidence presented over the last decade strengthens the growing consensus that low-level exposure to BPA has a significant impact on increasing the risks of developing conditions such as cancer, diabetes, impaired brain function, and behavioral problems in mammalian laboratory animals.' 

Britain has not enacted any changes yet, but Japan has limited levels of BPA in tins and has removed it from plastic containers used by children. 

Canada has listed BPA as a toxic chemical and banned it from baby bottles, and there are efforts in America, France and Australia to restrict or ban the use of BPA from children's bottles, cups and plates. 

But let's go back to what is happening to the word's oceans. Most of us have heard by now that there is a 'floating island of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas', or some variation of that. 

But it's not an island, and it's not something that can be cleaned up or somehow recycled. In fact, what is happening in the Pacific is happening in all five of the planet's ocean gyres – as the systems of currents are called.

And it's not really rubbish. It is plastic. It is breaking down into ever smaller pieces, but it can never biodegrade. In parts of the Pacific this plastic outweighs plankton seven to one. 

Fish mistake it for food and eat it. And we eat the fish. We are poisoning ourselves, and destroying the ocean. This is done in the name of free enterprise, unregulated markets, the right to do business and the right to make a profit – and in the name of convenience, evidently the most precious freedom we have.

The plastics industry insists that all we have to do is recycle. But why should we bear the cost and responsibility of recycling it? Why should we buy the stuff and then pay to dispose of it? In the case of the oceans, we will never be able to clean them up faster than the rate plastic is going in.

The answer is to stop producing it, to stop buying it. A few years ago I was on a remote beach in Spain and spent the day cleaning it up with another guy there, a German. It was mostly plastic. He muttered that the locals didn't appreciate the natural beauty of the place. 

Both of us assumed it had been thrown away there carelessly, perhaps dumped there. But now I don't think so. I can see now that it had all washed up there. Humans are slobs. 

There's no way around it. We are slobs. I know surfers who travel the world and ride the planet's most remote waves. They say there are plastic bottles washing up in Antarctica, in Patagonia, and all of the most distant and pristine beaches in the world. 

What are we doing? There are laws against defiling the public places in our cities. Where are the laws that protect our public planet, our commonly held wilderness, our oceans? 

Our oceans without which we certainly will perish? I had occasion to remark at my show at the Royal Albert Hall in London that we are the oil spill, and it is up to us to provide a solution to the problem. And that the more I have become used to carrying a metal bottle, the easier it is to just fill my own bottle and take it with me. 

On a night when I was singing my most personal reflections on life, I wanted to bring up the life of the planet. I wanted to ask us all to try to remember to do all we can in the face of all these disasters, and to continue doing things that make a difference. 

One thing we can do is to exercise our power as consumers, and to make choices that serve the interests of our families and of future generations, and the health of the planet. 

Please read the websites of 5 Gyres (5gyres.org), and Plastic Pollution Coalition (plasticpollutioncoalition.org), and go online and read Martin Hickman's brilliant article Bad Chemistry: The Poison In The Plastic That Surrounds Us. And oppose single-use plastic!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1293678/Jackson-Browne-I-Blame-bottled-water-oil-spill.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0tWcIu9Ys

Drinking bottled water is drinking oil

ScienceNOW reports a new paper by Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley in Environmental Research Letters that compares the energy use of bottled and tapwater:

… From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water.

Bottled water consumption has skyrocketed over the past several years. In 2007, some 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold worldwide, and Americans took the biggest gulp: 33 billion liters a year, an average of 110 liters per person. That amount has grown 70% since 2001, and bottled water has now surpassed milk and beer in sales. Many environmental groups have been concerned with this surge because they suspected that making and delivering a bottle of water used much more energy than did getting water from the tap. But until now, no one really knew bottled water’s energy price tag.

Environmental scientist Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, California, and his colleague Heather Cooley have added up the energy used in each stage of bottled-water production and consumption. Their tally includes how much energy goes into making a plastic bottle; processing the water; labeling, filling, and sealing a bottle; transporting it for sale; and cooling the water prior to consumption.

The two most energy-intensive categories, the researchers reveal in the current issue of Environmental Research Letters, are manufacturing the bottle and transportation. The team estimates that the global demand for bottle production alone uses 50 million barrels of oil a year–that’s 2 1/2 days of U.S. oil consumption. Determining the energy required to transport a bottle isn’t as straightforward. Some bottles of water travel short distances, but others are imported from far-off countries, which increases their energy footprint. Gleick and Cooley found that drinking an imported bottle of water is about two-and-a-half to four times more energy intensive than getting it locally, often outweighing the energy required to make the bottle.

All told, Gleick estimates that U.S. bottled-water consumption in 2007 required an energy input equivalent to 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil. Global energy demand for bottled water is three times that amount. To put that energy use into perspective, Gleick says to imagine that each bottle is up to one-quarter full of oil.

Changing Consumer Behavior One Water Bottle at a Time

Bottled water and oil - the Gulf of Mexico draws a parallel.

From an article by John Edson for Fast Company:

"....It's especially poignant to think about this relationship between oil and water in this post-Gulf-Coast-oil-disaster moment.

Water is good. Water is bad.

Ads from Evian and Brita

While we all know this, bottled water is super-convenient. It's not that we want to harm the planet, or think that our immediate need or ongoing healthy habits (water kicks soda's butt for hydration, right?) are more important. It's just that we're busy, and the bottled water is there--and we promise ourselves that we'll recycle the empties.

The fact is that tap water in my country (and probably yours if you're reading this) is super duper. If we only had a way to open the tap, grab a slug of it, put it in our pocket and dispense it at will, we'd have the convenient water that we need accessible when we want it. Fast Company did a fantastic piece about the bottled water industry here, pointing to just how this became such a thriving entity. 

Design--or design thinking, if you prefer--is tackling this problem, if not the impending problem of global drinking water shortage, in a number of inspiring ways that aim to start with the need, provide alternatives, and empower behavior change in us all......." 

read more..

Is this an intelligent use of resources for 1 liter of water?

It takes a quarter of a liter of oil and 3 liters of water to deliver 1 liter of bottled water. 

This is an intelligent use of the human ability to reason, right?

read more..