Portable, convenient and carrying a product widely believed to be of peerless purity, individual bottled-water containers seem to be everywhere. And they are: Americans consumed some 50 billion servings in 2006, making bottled water the second most popular beverage behind soft drinks.
Bottled water is certainly a healthier choice than a sugary soda pop. When both personal cost and environmental impact are factored in, however, the case for this product becomes a lot less clear.
Bottled water, on the other hand, is quite a bit more expensive. The half-liter bottle that costs $1 at the convenience store works out to nearly $7.80 a gallon – about 2½ times higher than gasoline prices that make many Americans wince and complain.
Filtered tap water is exactly what you’re buying when you choose two of the four top-selling major brands. Pepsico and Coca-Cola, whose products make up one-quarter of the bottled water sold in the United States, use reverse osmosis to purify municipal water at dozens of bottling plants throughout the nation.
The environmental costs start with the disposable plastic bottle itself. Americans recycle only about one-quarter of the plastic used to package bottled water. Thus, more than 1 million tons of water bottles end up in landfills annually.
Water is heavy – 8.3 pounds (3.8 kg) per gallon (3.8 l) – and so it takes a lot of fuel to run the trucks used to distribute full water bottles throughout the country. Look at it this way: A single case of half-liter water bottles sold in supermarkets weighs about 28 pounds (12.7 kg). Now, multiply that weight by 2 billion, representing a volume roughly equivalent to annual bottled-water sales. It takes a fleet of tens of thousands of tractor trailers to deliver that much water each year – water that can be delivered to taps everywhere at much lower energy cost by the pumps pressurizing municipal water systems.
The example above only covers the energy cost of delivering domestically produced water. Premium imported waters arrive at our shores aboard container ships, adding to the carbon burden.
If you decide to filter your tap water and bottle it for portable use, a plastic container may be fine, but avoid placing filled bottles in direct sunlight or hot places. The helps prevent some of the constituent chemicals in plastics from leaching into the water. Based on the results of at least two recent studies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has declared plastic food and beverage packaging to be completely safe for children and adults. If this remains a concern, however, stainless-steel containers are a good alternative.
If you’re an ardent fan of a particular brand of bottled water, diligently recycling the empty containers will help to lessen the environmental impact. Recycling helps reduce the use of crude oil and natural gas, both of which are major raw materials used in plastics manufacturing. The polyethylene and polycarbonate plastics used to package bottled water have many uses in the post-consumer waste market, contributing to the more than 1,400 products made from recycled plastics.
