Throwaway Nation by Jeff Dondero

Throwaway Nation by Jeff Dondero

Author:Jeff Dondero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00


Bamboozled by Water Bottles

Bottled water started to take off around 1977 when the iconic green-glass Perrier bottle was introduced and became a status symbol. A rumor raced around that it was healthier than water out of the tap, a fable that some still believe. Big changes came in 1989 with a technological innovation—lightweight and inexpensive water bottles. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on marketing by big hitters Pepsi and Coca-Cola and many others telling us that their water was pure, healthy, clean, and crisp. It made ordinary tap water sound like hand-me-down clothes. Actually, U.S. water-quality standards set by the EPA for tap water are more stringent than for bottled water, and 64 percent of brand-name waters (like Coke and Pepsi, Aquafina, and Dasani) come out of municipal taps.

We use roughly 60 percent of the world’s water bottles, even though we’re less than 5 percent of the world population, and we throw away 50 billion plastic water bottles every year, the majority of which aren’t recycled. Although approximately 800,000 tons of plastic bottles were recycled in 2011, more than twice as much was thrown away haphazardly.

On average, Americans spend about $100 per person each year on bottled water. Experts predict annual revenues to increase to $195 billion in 2018. At least 90 percent of the price of a bottle of water is for things other than the water itself, like bottling, packaging, shipping, and marketing. It takes up to 2,000 times as much energy to produce and transport the average plastic bottle of water to your home as it does to produce the same amount of tap water, and overall costs 2,000 times as much as tap water.

By the way, if you’re really into conspicuous consumption, try a bottle of Acqua di Cristallo water that comes in a 24-karat solid-gold bottle and contains a small sprinkling of gold dust, at $60,000 per 750 milliliters. Chances are, unless you are a Kardashian or a Trump, you won’t be tossing that bottle out.

The environmental consequences of the manufacturing, transport, and disposal of the bottles are brutal. The Earth Policy Institute estimates that making bottles to meet the U.S. demand requires enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars for a year, enough to lubricate a million cars and to power 190,000 homes annually. Transport and disposal of the bottles adds to the resources used, and water extraction adds to the strains bottled water puts on our ecosystem as simple waste.

Through campaign contributions, high-powered lobbyists, and expensive public relations campaigns, the plastics industry is able to keep proposed container deposit legislation bottled up in committees at both the state and national levels. They do not want the hassle that they went through with glass bottles.

The recommended eight glasses of water a day, at U.S. tap rates is about $49 per year. The same amount of bottled water is closer to $2,000 reported by the New York Times.



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