It's in the numbers. More bottled water begets more bottles than water. Billions and billions of bottles of water. And bottles. Where will this end?
A recent news article brought attention to the obvious. We’re drinking more bottled water.
Not just in the US, bottled water consumption is up significantly all over the world. Is there something wrong with my tap water?
Most of the US has clean tap water, yet the demand for bottled water has reached a new high. The cost is staggering.
On a shopping trip with my parents to Van’s I saw some bottled water at $2.00 a liter. That’s $8 a gallon. Gasoline in LA isn’t even $3.00 a gallon.
Forgotten in the glut of bottled water options at the local store is the bottles. The news reported that an average American drinks one eight-ounce bottle of water per person, per day.
On a shopping trip with my parents to Van’s I saw some bottled water at $2.00 a liter. That’s $8 a gallon. Gasoline in LA isn’t even $3.00 a gallon.America has a population of nearly 300-million people. That’s 365 days a year of bottles times 300-million people. If my math is accurate, that’s over 100-billion bottles. Yearly. Just in the US.
Where do the bottles go?
Some states have recycling efforts and laws and taxes which make the bottles more valuable, so they get collected and recycled.
How much? Not enough. The Container Recycling Institute says about 86-percent of our bottled water bottles end up in the garbage.
How long will they stay there? Some estimates say they’ll still be there in 1,000 years.
Bottled water is convenient and affordable (even at 1,000 times the cost of tap water, Tera?), and unless we plow our cars through bottle trash like snow plows during a Northeastern snow storm, we’re not likely to change our drinking habits any time soon.
It’s the numbers that scare me. If too much of something is bad for us, then a reduction should be better for us.
Any reduction begins with one, so here’s mine. No more bottled water at home. After all, it’s not like I’m dying of thirst.
If the issue is reducing container waste, this would apply to all types of beverages, from beer to sodas to juices, and all types of containers, aluminum and glass and plastics. In which case, the only solution is to create a culture of recycling. Which I believe can only get kick-started by making it too expensive to simply ‘trash’ the container.
If the issue is, what’s wrong with the tap water? well . . . maybe nothing. But in some states, regions, countries, maybe a lot. We have a carbon-something or the other-filter installed for drinking water in our home.