I read Edgars nice post about green bottle. I want to say my opinion... I love this design too, but there is one myth: Plastic bottles are recyclable, and are being made with thinner plastics, making them increasingly “green.”
Some 4 billion PET bottles end up in the U.S. waste stream each year, costing cities some $70 million in cleanup and landfill costs.
A plastic water bottle can take up to 1000 years to degrade in a landfill; [via] when plastic is burned in incinerators, it releases dioxins, some of the most harmful manmade chemicals that exist. And most recycling is actually downcycling: making lower quality products than the originals, and requiring the addition of virgin plastics and toxic chemicals in the process.
There is nothing green about that.
So, Is bottled water green? It’s got to be, it’s water. Right?
No!! It takes about three liters of water and approximately 3.4 megajoules of energy to produce and sell a single liter of water in a plastic bottle. The 31.2 billion liters of bottled water consumed annually in the United States require more than 17 million barrels of oil to produce. (Read this here) According to the Container Recycling Institute, in the U.S. an estimated 144 billion containers were wasted in 2005. While recycling the bottles offers moderate environmental benefits, drinking tap water has a MUCH lower carbon footprint than drinking bottled water.
Source
That makes drinking tap water one of the best, and easiest, things we can do to reduce global warming.
Thanks for your article, Jan.
But there will be bottled water, sodas and so on. Few years ago no one believed that people would actually buy water in bottle. It was someting like - what will be next, air in bottles?
But the thing is, we need to thing new solutions. This keeps world moving on.
@Edgars you may want to read more reasons on why Jan is right:
http://www.greatindiansale.org/2009/07/lets-talk-trash.html
Click on the image to enlarge and read the poster. And also watch the fascinating TED talk.
It is good to have a choice, but why buy bottled water if you have access to quality water from your tap? Common sense should prevail….
I will write more information in one of the other articles.
@Hemant Thanks for this website.
@ Radka, I agree with you. It’s acceptable to buy bottled water if you have no access to drinking water, but it’s nonsensical to fork out £2.00 plus per litre for water when you have ready access in your homes and workplace. Especially considering all the environmental damage it entails. After starting the climate change blog I vowed to stop buying bottled water wherever possible. Now I take my own water everywhere I can, and ask for tap water in restaurants. I think it’s an easy change for most people to make.
There are some reasons why you buy bottled water. You want to drink and your choice is sweet soda, juice or bottled water. We do not have common tradition to have water available on a way from public tap. And more for that are we great enough to carry bottles with us?
Unfortunately there is sense in bottled water for comfort, but less sense as for eco thinker and believer.
here’s a great article on why bottled water makes no sense: http://www.newint.org/features/2008/09/01/message-in-a-bottle/
I completely agree that is a nonsense buying bottled water where there is access to drinkable water right from the tap, although I can not make a sincere statement about this issue, since the water that comes from the tap in the city where I live is not only undrinkable, but also dangerous even for taking a simple bath. (In fact this is one of the issues I’m writing about for th!nk).
However, where the water is healthy (like in my hometown) it is plain ridiculous to give money to some company so they can put a fancy, expensive eco-unfriendly container to the same water that you already have at home.
Thanks for this post!
I also support tap water, it’s the greenest ever!