I got this from Robert Osborne's excellent blog Watercrunch (watercrunch.blogspot.com). The link is to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle (18 February 2007) "The Real Cost of Bottled Water":
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/02/18/EDG56N6OA41.DTL
The article is by Jared Blumenfeld (Director, SF Department of the Environment) and Susan Leal, (General Manager, SF Public Utilities Commission)
Here are some sobering facts from the article:
Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
More than 1 billion plastic water bottles end up in the California's trash each year, taking up valuable landfill space, leaking toxic additives, such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to biodegrade. That means bottled water may be harming our future water supply.
Blumenfeld and Leal offer some suggestions:
-- In the office, use a water dispenser that taps into tap water. The only difference your company will notice is that you're saving a lot of money.
-- At home and in your car, switch to a stainless steel water bottle and use it for the rest of your life knowing that you are drinking some of the nation's best water and making the planet a better place.
Here in Oregon, we are trying to get our bottle and can deposit bill raised to 10 cents per container (plastic, glass, or aluminum) and extend the law to cover sports drinks and water. When the law was passed over 30 years ago, only soft drinks and beer were covered. It is estimated that about 125,000,000 of these non-covered plastic bottles are in our landfills.
"Human beings were invented by water to transport it uphill."
Comments