Bottled Water - It's not good for the environment

Bottled water is thought to be healthy for you. But it is not necessarily healthy for the environment.Below are a few reasons why:

• The containers are made of plastic or glass. When full, both become very heavy. It costs a lot in gas to ship heavy bottles around the country, much less around the world.


• Close to 2 million tons of plastic was used to make bottles for water last year. That manufacturing involves an enormous about of petroleum, since it is a key ingredient in plastic. In the U.S. alone, 30 million bottles a day, billions of bottles a year get tossed out. Recycling them costs another small fortune in gasoline to haul them to plants.  If they're not recycled, they fill up landfills.


• Bottled water is being promoted all over the world by a host of companies such as PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Co., Nestle and others. These companies are staking their future on getting you to drink water from bottles since it is getting harder and harder to persuade you to drink soda and other sugared water from their cans — and it’s working.


• According to Beverage Marketing Corp., a provider of beverage-related data, consumption of bottled water has been growing by a gallon a year per capita in the U.S., and consumption has doubled in the past decade. Americans now drink more water from bottles overall than any other nation. However, we are only tenth among nations of the world in drinking bottled water per capita, trailing Italy, Mexico, Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland.

If you want to do something to really reduce global warming and cut down the earth’s pollution burden, stop buying bottled water. The containers translate into oil in the shipping, oil in the refrigerating and oil in the recycling, not to mention the oil that’s also needed in the manufacturing of plastic bottles.