Bottled Water – It’s Time to Just Say No
Recently, author Peter Gleick sat down with Fresh Air host Terry Gross to discuss his new book Bottled and Sold, in which he answers a lot of questions about bottled water: Where does it come from? Who regulates it? And what happens to all of those plastic bottles? Gleick is a water expert who was named a MacArthur fellow in 2003, so he clearly knows his stuff. And once you hear what he has to say, it will make it hard to purchase another bottle unless you are literally dying of thirst.
Let’s start with the environmental impact of the plastic water bottle. In the United States, every minute of every day a thousand plastic water bottles are opened, consumed and discarded. About 30% of the bottles are recycled. The other 70% go to landfill where they will lie pretty much forever.
If the 30% that get recycled were made into more water bottles, this would be a good thing. But they aren’t. They are sent to China and made into things like polyester fabric and rugs. The problem with this is that plastic bottles are made out of a plastic called PET, aka polyethylene terephthalate, aka the bottles with the number one on the bottom. This type of plastic is excellent for storing food (it’s durable, impervious to heat, light weight and strong), but it’s terrible for the environment. What happens to the bottles is actually called down cycling rather than recycling. Not only are the bottles shipped across a very big ocean (which takes a lot of energy) but in order to make new bottles manufacturers must use raw petroleum, a very expensive material to make new, virgin PET, most of which of ends up in landfill.
http://www.globalshift.org/2010/06/bottled-water-–-it’s-time-to-just-say-no/
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