This was posted on the USAToday.com in 2008. Great article on the environmental and health effects of bottled water.
Thirst for bottled water unleashes flood of environmental concerns
Posted 6/7/2008 1:00 AM |
By Krisy Gashler, The Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal
Once reserved for Perrier-sipping elitists, bottled water has become a drink of the masses.
Sales have quadrupled in the last 20 years, and rose almost 8% last year alone.
Marian Brown, an assistant to the provost at
Ithaca College who works on sustainability initiatives, has watched this
growth with dismay.
"More and more people, more and more entities on
campus, even for special events, were starting to think, 'Gosh, let's do
bottled water,' instead of putting out (pitchers) of water," Brown
said. "It's like, 'God no, they're making it worse!'"
The problem isn't the water — it's the use of
resources. It takes a lot of oil to make all those little bottles and
ship them, sometimes halfway around the world. But Tom Lauria, vice
president of communications for the International Bottled Water
Association, said bottled water isn't the environmental bad guy.
Sales on the rise
There's no question that sales of bottled water are increasing.
According to Lauria's bottled water association,
in 1990, 2.2 billion total gallons of bottled water were sold worldwide.
In 2007, it was 8.8 billion.
In just the last year, wholesale dollar sales for
bottled water grew 7.8%, to $11.7 billion in 2007, according to the
bottled water trade group.
Increased purchasing of bottled water is good
news, Lauria said, because much of the sales growth is coming from
people making a health-conscious decision not to buy soda and sugary
juices.
"We're finding that most of that growth is in
category switching," Lauria said, citing consumer research. "People are
making a decision at lunch to buy bottled water as opposed to something
else. Some people want to reduce caffeine, sugar, many reasons."
The Container Recycling Institute found that
between 1997 and 2005, sales of carbonated drinks remained relatively
flat while sales of noncarbonated drinks, including bottled water,
almost tripled.
Plastic water bottles produced for U.S.
consumption take 1.5 million barrels of oil per year, according to a
2007 resolution passed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. That much
energy could power 250,000 homes or fuel 100,000 cars for a year,
according to the resolution.
Cornell University professor and environmentalist
Doug James said the irony of bottled water is that it's marketed as
clean and healthy when its production contributes to unnecessary
environmental degradation.
"Fiji water, for example," he said. "A one-liter
bottle is taken out of the aquifer of this little island, and shipped
all the way across the world, producing like half a pound of greenhouse
gases so you can have this one-liter bottle of water."
The taste question
Another obvious issue in the consumption of bottled water is taste.
In some areas, tap water simply isn't drinkable, Brown said, and in those situations, bottled water is a useful resource.
Other consumers simply prefer the taste of bottled water, Lauria said.
"Consumers have lots of preferences and some
people want mineral water for taste," he said. "Everyone has their own
reasons for buying products. And some people have a preference for
bottled water."
But, Brown argues, perceptions about the taste of
tap water and realities about the taste of tap water can be very
different things.
To test her hypothesis that tap water tastes as
least as good as bottled water, Brown has been conducting a series of
taste tests at Ithaca College in the past year.
In five blind taste tests over the last year, the tap water has won four times, she said.
The growth in advertising and consumption of
bottled water has occurred "frankly, since the big soda companies bought
up water," she said. "They would buy up the Dasanis, and they would buy
up the Poland Springs, and you get into the huge marketing machines of
the major soda industries, Coke and Pepsi, notably, and they take it to a
whole different field."
Water and waste
Then there's the waste stream.
In roughly the last 10 years, the amount of
polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles being recycled increased from
about 775 million pounds in 1995 to about 1,170 million in 2005,
according to the Container Recycling Institute.
But during the same time period, the amount of
PET bottles going into landfills skyrocketed from 1,175 million to 3,900
million pounds.
Water bottles are a big part of that problem,
Brown says, because there are so many more of them, and because in many
states, water bottles don't have a redemption value like soda and beer
bottles do.
Lauria said the focus on water bottles is unfair
because they make up "less than one-third of one percent" of the entire
U.S. waste stream.
"There are many other plastic objects that are in
our lives that no one seems to be concerned about and yet it all needs
to be recycled," he said. "As you recycle bottled water you should also
recycle many other products that are in your refrigerator when you're
done with them."
Brown said that better recycling rates of water
bottles would certainly help, but even better would be for people to
stop using bottled water when tap water will do just fine.
"Even if we can do a good job of separating and
recycling water bottles, it still comes down to the fact that it's
completely unnecessary," she said. "From a cost standpoint alone, people
should be starting to think about, 'I'm paying $1.19 or whatever it is
for a bottle of water that I could get free out of my drinking water
tap?'"
Hidden costs of water
Strictly speaking, tap water isn't free — it costs about $0.00002 per ounce.
But single-serve bottled water costs between 1,000 and 4,000 times more, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Some cities, including San Francisco,
Albuquerque, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have banned city purchase of
single-serve bottled water because of waste impact from the bottles and
because it's viewed as an unnecessary cost to taxpayers.
On the waste reduction hierarchy, reduce and
reuse should be above recycle, said Tompkins County Solid Waste manager
Barb Eckstrom.
Even so, bottled water can provide a healthier
choice in situations, like sports events, where people are going to buy
drinks anyway, she said.
Brown reiterated that clearly "there is a place for bottled water."
"But for so many of us here in the Finger Lakes
we're so blessed with excellent water systems, we need to at all costs
preserve and maintain (them)," she said.
Improve your health and the environment - get off the bottle!!
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