The Ethical Use Of Bottled Water

Have you ever considered what is happening to all the plastic bottles you use? According to "Bottled Water: The Wrong Choice paragraph 2" it states, that when plastic bottles are made we are using more fossil fuels. By doing this we are damaging environment!

There are many impacts that bottled water has on the environment. The choice of packaging determines many impacts. The bottles, which are either plastic, aluminum, or glass, that are not recycled are thrown into landfills and buried. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86% of plastic water bottles in the United States become garbage. If water bottlers would have used 10% recycled materials in their plastic bottles in 2004, they would have saved the equivalent of 72 million gallons of gasoline. If they used 25%, they would have saved enough energy to power more than 680,000 homes for a year (Jemmott, 2008). Incinerating used bottles produces toxins such as chlorine gas and ash. Water bottles that get buried can take up to thousands of years to biodegrade. The most common type of plastic is polyethylene

From helping the daily jogger stay hydrated during a run to that mom and family trying to stay hydrated at the amusement park, bottled water has had a lot of good to it. However do those goods outweigh the bad? In “Bottled Water: Friend or Foe?” by Christopher Castillo, Diana Goettsch, Angela Reid, and Catherine Sterling argue bottled water are our worst enemy, reasons being the bottle itself has harming chemicals within it which we are drinking, bottled water damages our environment, and lastly we are spending more on bottled water when we have the same water coming from our sinks.

You can’t walk across a college campus, past an office building, or through a park without seeing one, two, or ten empty bottles. Many are plastic water bottles. Trash bins overflow them. Those water bottles are a problem. Why? Because only one out of five bottles actually makes it to a recycling bin. Plastic bottles take centuries to decompose and if they are incinerated, toxic byproducts, such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals, are releasing into the atmosphere. The rest are littered on our streets or over filing our landfills. They degrade our landscape and damage our environment. In addition the plastic water bottles are not biodegradable that is, they don’t decay. They remain as trash a hundreds of years.

In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity (Standage). In the article “Plastic Water Bottles Causing Flood or Harm to the Environment,” the Earth Policy Institute factors the energy used to pump, process, transport, and refrigerate bottled water as over 50 million barrels of oil every year (Schriever). It’s absurd that so many resources are used to make plastic bottles which are not necessary at all. Bottled water does allow us to drink water out of it but in reality bottled water is very bad for

Do you know that it will take 1000 years for a plastic bag to decompose? Our world is the most friendly planet for human beings and every other living thing. We should never take our planet for granted because there is no other like this one and in order for us to keep our planet safe and sound, we should get rid of plastic bags. The other most effective way to keep our planet safe is to recycle every plastic bottle that we used. Every plastic product should not be thrown to the garbage because plastic bottles will take several decades to decompose in soil.

I mean these bottles are sold in vending machines, groceries stores, social events such as festivals, and so much more. Besides the bottles sold commercially these bottles end up in landfills, streams, trees, or places where plastic bottles do not belong. If the plastic bottle was biodegradable once we finished with the plastic bottle instead throwing away and ended up in the landfill. The bottle can be decomposed properly. Since the mass production not just on plastic bottles, but material

Besides being costly to the environment and to users, consuming bottled water does not come without health concerns. The plastic in bottled water, PET, breaks down and releases toxic chemicals into the water. “A study of 132 brands of bottled

Many people believe that bottled water is much safer than tap water. This is a false statement according to websites like CNN, National, Geographic and Money Crashers.

Priscilla Torres goes on to describe the many downsides bottles of water bring to people as well as the environment in “Bottled Water Vs. Tap Water: Rethink What You Drink”. Torres first claims that the water bottles companies can be “misleading” (Torres) with where they tell the public of the waters source. In some cases, companies turn to flat out lying in their “labels” (Torres) and could be serving you potentially “hazardous” (Torres) products.

They make us believe that bottled water is safer but in reality it is actually inadequate for us. Plastic gets into the water that the bottle is holding, which the chemicals that they are using to make the bottles have been said to cause cancer. Tap water is not the best either because the

“Eighty-six percent of water bottles end up in landfills or in the ocean” (Sexton & Morley). The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) tested over 1,000 bottles of water to find out what kind of water was really in the bottle (Jemmott). They found out that an estimated 25% or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle (Olson). It is sometimes treated more, sometimes not. Also the NRDC tested water for contaminants. Most didn’t have any but 22% of the brands contained chemical contaminants (Olson). Most of these chemicals were strict above the state health limits. If the water inside the bottle becomes contaminated the producers don’t have to let the consumers know. Although many people believe plastic bottles are convenient, nevertheless they can extremely harm you because of the chemicals in the plastic and is also causing harm to the earth.

Americans utilize a great deal of water, in fact, the average American uses 90 gallons a day (Henshaw). So it is not surprising America has one of the cleanest water reserves in the world (“Water Quality”). A surprising statistic, however, is one-third of the American population drinks bottled water on a regular basis when the majority has clean drinking water at home (Olsen). This might be due to the fact that the bottled water industry has promoted itself as a healthier and more portable alternative to tap water. However, the truth is startling as bottled water is only a misleading, expensive, and dangerous gimmick to bring in revenue for large companies.

Water is an essential part of daily living and having clean water in the United States is becoming a topic of discussion. According to World Health Organization, (2015) “six hundred- sixty six million people lack access to safe water, twice the population of the United States lives without access to safe water”. The question becomes is bottle water safer than tap water in the United States. The bottle water industry would strongly disagree indicating bottle water is regulated more than tap water.

The water bottle industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States. This being said, our landfills are filled with more than eighty five percent of plastic bottles. Their long lifetime and thoughtless consumers are not only filing our dumps with these plastic bottles, but hurting our oceans too. Since water bottles do not biodegrade, they can float aimlessly on the ocean surface for years. They also may cause a passing predator to be fooled into thinking it is a resting prey. Little did that predator know, they were going to have a serious stomach ache trying to digest a plastic bottle. It also pollutes the soil and waterways as well. Besides the space water bottles physically fill, their production waste is just as dire. In America alone, we use about seventeen