We drink bottled water

Today read an article by Lajla Mlinarić about bottled water here.

Bottled water, an increasingly popular drink in the world, has an exceptionally high price for the environment being added to the amount of plastic waste and the depletion of natural sources, says the author of a recent report.

Bottled water is actually expensive – both in the ecological sense and the economic sense, claims Ling Li, the author of a report for the Worldwatch institute in Washington.

In developed countries, there is a threat of poorer control of quality of bottled water than that from the tap. Apart from energy expenses of production, bottling, packing, storing and transporting of bottled water, there is a price for the environment of million tonnes of plastic needed for the production of bottles.

The beverage industry has most benefited from our obsession with bottled water, Ling stresses. But this doesn't mean anything to the large number of poor people over the world to whom bottled water is luxury in the best case and an unreachable goal in the worst.

Worldwatch estimates that some 35-50 percent of city residents of Africa and Asia do not have adequate access to drinkable water, apart from bottled water.

Water is mostly filled into the bottles made of pilyethilene-terephtalate (PET), for which recycling less energy is needed and chlorine is not released into the atmosphere when burning. However there is a fall in the rate of recycling: in the US around 23.1 percent of PET bottles was recycled in comparison to 39.7 percent ten years before.
Bottled water costs 240 to 10,000 times more than that from the faucet. Counting in dollars bottled water sold in most industrially developed countries costs 500 to 1,000 dollars per squared meter, compared to 50 cents per squared meter in California, where the quality of the faucet water is utterly low.

The global consumption of bottled water in the period from 1997 to 2005 has more than doubled, with the top consumer being the United States, whose population in 2005 drank almost 28.6 billion litres of bottled water.

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The production of bottled watter damages the environment, more than that it's a rather expensive process; that's why bottled water cost a lot, especially in particular countries.