The Many Effects of the Water Bottle
The Rise of Bottled
Environmental Impacts
Social Impacts
Results (see below)
From our school, we collected results from a survey to see whether children our age know anything about water bottles and their effects. The results are shocking, and we need to make a change fast as it all starts with us.
Think Outside The Bottle
Help reduce the effects of water bottles. One way to do that is recycling. Its just one simple word. Help take time time to throw your bottle not in the garbage, but in recycling bins. Another thing we can do, is create one of those days like earth our, where everyone can come together and pick up the bottles fin on our roadsides to help our planet earth.
- Water Bottled water market tripled over past 10 years
- More than 75% of the people in this country drink bottled water.
- One in five Americans drink only bottled water even though bottled water is thousands of times more expensive than tap water.
Environmental Impacts
- Making plastic bottled water required the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil last year and generated 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.
- To visualize the entire energy costs of the life cycle of bottled water, imagine filling each bottle with a quarter of oil.
- Each year, more than 4 billion pounds of plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter.
- Less than 20% of plastic water bottles are recycled.
- It can cost cities more than $70 million in tipping fee disposal costs alone, not including the costs of collection, trucking and litter removal.
- Extraction: Some bottlers take water in large volumes from springs and aquifers, which can dry up wells, deplete wetlands and drain rivers.
- Water pumps can extract water 24/7, taking millions of gallons each day.
Social Impacts
- Up to 40% of bottled water comes from already treated municipal water systems; paid for at taxpayer expense. Water bottlers then sell this water back to the public at thousands of times the price, virtually unchanged.
- In 2007, 8.8 billion gallons of bottled water were sold in the U.S.
- If the public and future generations increasingly believe that the only place to get clean, safe drinking water is from a bottle, there will be decreased political support to fund our public water systems.
- Since a lot of oil is spent on water bottles, it will mean less oil in future time. This means gas prices will increases and war for oil will soon begin.
Results (see below)
From our school, we collected results from a survey to see whether children our age know anything about water bottles and their effects. The results are shocking, and we need to make a change fast as it all starts with us.
Think Outside The Bottle
Help reduce the effects of water bottles. One way to do that is recycling. Its just one simple word. Help take time time to throw your bottle not in the garbage, but in recycling bins. Another thing we can do, is create one of those days like earth our, where everyone can come together and pick up the bottles fin on our roadsides to help our planet earth.