Addicted to Oil- Bottled Water- Beverage Containers

I Just Gotta Tell Ya

• Average US Citizen Spend over $400.00/year on bottled water or 100 Billion Dollars is spent every year by consumers on bottled water
• Average cost per gallon=$3.79 or 1,900 times the cost of tap water.
• 86% of bottled water land up as garbage
• 1500 water bottles end up in garbage every second
• 17,000, 000 barrels of oil were used to product the plastic bottles or enough fuel for 100,000 cars a year
• 2,500,00 tons of carbon dioxide was produced in the manufacturing of the plastic bottle.
• The US uses 2 Million plastic bottle beverage every 5 minutes
• Adding in transportation, the energy used comes to more 50 million barrels of oil equivalent — enough to run 3 million cars for a year

  Survey shows

• 35% of bottled water drinkers think it’s safer than Tap Water
• Think it’s safe keeping bottle water in car – Heat in car and the plastic of bottles can leach out chemical that can lead to breast and other types of cancer.

Purity

• More than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. Despite this, bottled water consumption is growing at 10 percent a year, faster than any other beverage. We drink 15 times more bottled water today than we did in 1976
• Laboratory tests conducted for EWG at one of the country’s leading water quality laboratories found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants altogether, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand. More than one-third of the chemicals found are not regulated in bottled water. In the Sam’s Choice and Acadia brands levels of some chemicals exceeded legal limits in California as well as industry-sponsored voluntary safety standards. Four brands were also contaminated with bacteria
• Walmart’s Sam’s Choice bottled water purchased at several locations in the San Francisco bay area was polluted with disinfection byproducts called trihalomethanes at levels that exceed the state’s legal limit for bottled water (CDPR 2008). These byproducts are linked to cancer and reproductive problems and form when disinfectants react with residual pollution in the water. Las Vegas tap water was the source for these bottles, according to Walmart representatives (EWG 2008).
• Also in Walmart’s Sam’s Choice brand, lab tests found a cancer-causing chemical called bromodichloromethane at levels that exceed safety standards for cancer-causing chemicals under California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65, OEHHA 2008). EWG is filing suit under this act to ensure that Walmart posts a warning on bottles as required by law: “WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.”
• These same chemicals also polluted Giant’s Acadia brand at levels in excess of California’s safety standards, but this brand is sold only in Mid-Atlantic states where California’s health-based limits do not apply. Nevertheless, disinfection byproducts in both Acadia and Sam’s Choice bottled water exceeded the industry trade association’s voluntary safety standards (IBWA 2008a), for samples purchased in Washington DC and 5 states (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and California). The bottled water industry boasts that its internal regulations are stricter than the FDA bottled water regulations(IBWA 2008b), but voluntary standards that companies are failing to meet are of little use in protecting public health.

Environment

• Water Mining for bottling- places a severe strain on natural resources such as rivers, streams – which effect drinking supplies for communities. (Boldt-Van Rooy 2003, Hyndman 2007, ECONorthwest 2007).

Case study: Fiji water

• Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles of water a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water (see this Fast Company article). Adding to the irony, Fiji itself uses almost no bottled water, according to a Pacific Institute report (PDF). They export it.

• Shipping Fiji Water around the world increases its environmental footprint. Manufacturing and shipping a one-liter bottle produces over half a pound of greenhouse gas emissions and uses nearly 7 times the amount of water in the bottle, according to calculations by Pablo Päster on TriplePundit.

• The heavy use of water is as serious as the greenhouse gas emissions. Water is fast becoming a scarce resource.

• earth911.com
• earth-olicy.org
• us.oneworld.net
• commondreams.org
• webmd.com
• filterforgood.com