Bottled water foolishness

Those of you who read my blogs or know me are aware that I am strongly opposed to buying drinking water. I think you should drink tap water. (Note to my relatives in Flint: if your pipes have not been fixed, you may be excused.) I have written one post about this, called “Hydration foolishness”—which I encourage you to read—but am now adding more ammunition:

• On average, it takes 2,000 times as much energy to bottle water, transport it, and refrigerate it than getting it from your tap. What’s more, global plastic consumption rose from 5.5 million tons in 1950 (when everyone got their water from a tap) to around 100 million tons in 2009. 
• About half the people in US drink water from a bottle—either occasionally or as their main source. Nearly 50 billion plastic bottles of water were sold in the US last year!
• Drinking bottled water is a waste of your money. If you bought a single-serving bottle every day (about $1 apiece in New York), you'd spend about $365. But if you were to refill a single-serving plastic bottle of water (16.9 ounces) in New York City every day for a year, it would cost you only 63 cents.
• Just under a third of those billions of bottles sold in the US is recycled.
• About eight million metric tons end up in the ocean every year. That’s on top of the 110 million metric tons of plastic already there. (About half of this comes from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.)

So get your water from the tap! The bottled water you are drinking may be coming from a tap anyway, since 25% of the water sold in the US comes from a municipal source (and half the leading bottled water brands get their water from my drought-stricken state of California).

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.