80 percent of the plastic water bottles we buy end up in landfills. U.S. landfills are overflowing with more than 2 million tons of discarded water bottles. It takes up to 1,000 years for every single bottle of water to decompose. Each bottle leaks harmful chemicals into our environment along the way as it decomposes.
With the growth of the Canadian bottled water industry, the country has become a net exporter of water products. Most of the bottled water produced in Canada is exported, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The U.S. is Canada's largest market and U.S. exports comprise most of Canada's total bottled water production.
Each year, 35 billion plastic water bottles are thrown in the trash in the United States alone. The total carbon footprint of one 500 ml (16.9 oz) bottle of water is 828g of carbon dioxide. Water transported from overseas can have an even higher footprint!
You're wasting money
If you're regularly buying bottled water, you're spending far more money than you would by just drinking out of the tap. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC) the average cost of bottled water in 2016 was $1.11 per gallon.
Safety. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set the standards for bottled water. They require manufacturers to process and transport bottled water under sanitary conditions and to use processes that ensure the safety of the water. This means that, in general, bottled water is safe to drink.
The plastic bottles leech chemicals into the water, which can lead to a number of problems. Small plastic bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which leech in harmful plastic chemicals and hormone disruptors into the drinking water.
Drinking bottled water helped people avoid diseases like cholera, typhoid and dysentery. But by 1920, most U.S. cities offered free, filtered, chlorinated water, which dramatically improved public health.
Tap water and bottled water are generally comparable in terms of safety. So the choice of tap or bottled is mostly a matter of personal preference. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees bottled water, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates tap water.
Free of Impurities. Tap water is carefully prepared to be drinkable, but it goes through a lot to get to your faucet that can add contaminants and impurities back into it after it has been filtered. Bottled water is safe from these issues as it goes into the bottles in its purest form, clean of any debris or impurities ...
Processing plastic resins and transporting plastic bottles contribute to a bottle's carbon footprint in a major way. Estimates show that one 500-milliliter (0.53 quarts) plastic bottle of water has a total carbon footprint equal to 82.8 grams (about 3 ounces) of carbon dioxide.
The results, released this month, show that for North American companies, it takes 1.39 liters to make one liter of water. That's less than the global averages of a liter of soda, which requires 2.02 liters of water.
Anyway, one litre of water has a footprint of just 0.298 grammes of CO² equivalents. So even if you had one very full bath - about 150 litres - every day for a year, overall it would represent just 15kg of greenhouse gas emissions.
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