Bottled water-- ask your self these simple questions: do we drink it for the taste, for the health benefits, or merely for the sake of convenience? After answering these questions I ask you to step back and tell me if it tastes any different then what you have drank before and if you could gain the same convenience if you bought a bottle that you could reuse. Carrying bottled water has become a trend for roughly half of the American population. We have bought into the marketing campaigns of multinational companies trying to sell us water- water that we can easily get if we just opened the taps in our very own homes. In the commercials that we are constantly bombarded with, we see labels for their water such as: ‘pristine pools of spring water’, ‘majestic alpine peaks’; we see healthy people gulping down cold sips of this clean water while running or biking in the mountains or women coming out of their yoga classes. However, people are starting to realize that this water is not anything special. Yet we continue to buy it to the point that bottling company sales go up by 7 percent annually (Baskid)! In reality bottled water is truly needed in third world countries where there are sanitation issues in their water supply, not here in the United States where we have water that goes through many regulations to meet high standards. Bottled water benefits the industry that produces it and helps Americans because of our need for convenience. However, it is a problem that will fill up our landfills, increase carbon emissions, and drain our wallets.
Do you recycle your empty water bottles? About twenty percent of us recycle while the other eighty percent throw the bottles away. These bottles then turn into 1.5 million tons of plastic waste (Baskid), a tragic result caused by the beautiful water bottles that we drink out of. Millions more end up in the oceans, on the streets, and in our forests which then starts to harm other animals for they tend to eat this plastic, thinking its food. So what happens to all the bottles that do end up in the landfill? They should be decaying at a fast rate so that we have wiggle room to pollute some more, right? Wrong. The rate of decay for plastic is very slow. We have plastic lying around on our planet from years and years ago, although we don’t know where it is. However, this is the least of our worries: according to the ‘Bottled Water Campaign’ by the Sierra Club there are chemicals that are in those plastic bottles. When the bottles decay, these dangerous chemicals seep into the ground and in to our food and water supplies…nice.
How much fuel is used up by these companies every year to get your majestic mountain peak water to you? And according to the Pacific Institute, it takes 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. According to Food and Water Watch, the plastic needed to make these bottles requires about 47 millions gallons of oil per year to produce. This is without adding the amount of gasoline required for transportation of the bottles to the filling centers and then to their consumers. Some of these consumers live half way around the world, which means so much more fuel is needed for ships, trains, and busses. Cutting the production alone of these bottles would be the equivalent of taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the streets for good, which would then lead to less green house gasses. Peter Gleik, an expert on water policy and the director of the Pacific Institute, mentioned that with the pollution caused with this industry its almost like a quarter of each bottled produced is filled with oil. But no, we have the cars and we have the bottles, and a growing population to add more bottles and cars every year.
How much money can you get bottled water for? Most bottled water is sold in vending machines, next to soft drinks for the same price. Each bottle has about twenty ounces of water, and if you were to buy a bottle for a dollar, each ounce would cost you about five cents. Local water supplies cost less then one cent per gallon. Now look at this comparison. Gasoline has to get pumped out of the ground in the form of crude oil, sent to refineries, and then shipped around the world to filling stations. A gallon of gasoline is now being sold to us for about 2 dollars and then some, which means that each ounce of oil cost less than 2 cents. This is black oil compared to something that comes out of your tap. Americans value their money; maybe they should spend it more wisely.
I propose we buy bottles that can be reused. There are a lot out there that are just as convenient, if not more so, than the plastic ones that we carry around. These bottles can also be personalized, something that is not the case with regular plastic bottles. Besides, America is a country all about individualism. Tap water is best alternative for this natural spring water that isn’t even all it’s made out to be. If you still want to make the water cleaner, you can buy a filter that would cost a fraction of the money spent on water bottles in a year.
“Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day”(Lewis). Words of Anton Checkhov show us that when taking convenience into our hands humans can be mere destroys of this planet, in so many more ways that sometimes we might think, Bottle water companies are just one of the culprits that are destroying the planet and trying to dry up water supplies that are a man’s right. Water bottles might be convenient for most American’s, but convenience isn’t everything. It’s about time we started watching out for each other and the only way we can really make sure we do that is if we start reducing our intake of bottled water. By reducing our intake we might reduce carbon emissions and save our landfills from millions of bottles it definitely does not need. This change will not start in a day or a week, but over time I do believe we can rid the dependence Americans have developed of their Dasani and Aquafina. I suggest that we keep the dollar fifty in your pocket and while doing so save the planet one bottle at a time.
Work Cited
Baskid, Chris. "Five Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water." Lighter Footstep. 11 May 2008. 10
Nov. 2008 <http://lighterfootstep.com/2008/05/five-reasons-not-to-drink-bottled-water/>.
"Bottled Water and Energy." A Fact Sheet. Pacific Institute. 10 Nov. 2008
Lewis, Jone J. "Nature Quotes." Nature Quotes. 11 Nov. 2008
Water. 10 Nov. 2008. Food and Water Watch. 10 Nov. 2008
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