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Bottled Water

Want to help reduce our nation’s dependency on oil? Don’t drink bottled water.

You probably never thought of how much energy it takes to transport a bottle of water from Fiji in the South Pacific to a retail store in, say, Crested Butte, Colorado. When you begin to add it up, not just this one trans-pacific path but those followed by the 154 billion liters worth of bottled water consumed around the world in 2004, it amounts to massive use of fossil fuels.

And that’s just the beginning.  Not only is fossil fuel necessary to transport the water, but it’s also used in manufacturing and packaging, because the vast majority of all types of plastics used today are made from petroleum.  Then there’s the problem of disposing of the used bottles. While they can be recycled, not everyone chooses to do so. The Container Recycling Institute reports a whopping 86% of plastic water bottles in this country end up as garbage or litter.

Is bottled water worth it?  For many people, especially in places like the U.S. where safety regulations for tap water are stronger than those for bottled water, it probably isn’t.  Tap water is often just as safe, or safer, to drink.  It also costs a whole lot less.  Bottled water costs on average about $10 per gallon, more than three times as much as gasoline.

Scientific research has also begun to raise questions about the safety of bottled water.  In some cases, it’s drawn from unregulated, contaminated sources.  Under current regulations, no guarantee comes with the bottle.  And to complicate the picture further, scientists have discovered that some types of plastics leach unhealthy chemicals into bottled water.  The plastic used most commonly for bottled water, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) leaches a metal, antimony, at measurable levels.  Some scientists have challenged this as unhealthy.  Another common plastic, polycarbonate, leaches a synthetic estrogen called bisphenol A, which has been linked by animal experiments to a wide array of health effects, at exposure levels within the range that people will experience when drinking water from a polycarbonate bottle.

So the first step to take in making a choice about where you get your water is to ask your local water authority about its safety. Unless local water supplies are known to be tainted with lead or other toxic chemicals, filtered tap water may be the safer choice.

For more information on this story, go to:

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update51.htm

For information about what’s in your tap water:

http://www.ewg.org/sites/tapwater/

For more information on the adverse health effects associated with plastics, click here or read this fact sheet.

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org