The Human Footprint of Plastic Water bottles Essay

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

Many of people have not realized that the creation of bottled water affects our environment. The production of water bottles requires a large amount of water plus the water that is needed to fill the bottle. Considering there is a shortage of water in several places, water should be better handled and not wasted on plastic bottle making. Of the eighty million single serve bottles of water consumed daily, thirty million ends up in landfills (Soechtig, 2009 qtd. in “Bottled Water: The Risks to Our Health, Our

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!

The reason for millions of people using plastic water bottles is that everyone needs to drink water. However, many people do not know that a plastic bottle can be more harmful than beneficial for the drinker’s health. Refillable water bottles (which may be plastic but are made for refillable use) should be used instead of plastic bottles because they are cheaper, healthier, and better for the Earth.

PET requires a huge amount of fossil fuels to create, and for a single-use bottle, that is a lot of fuel to burn. Despite the huge mass of water bottles, most of them aren’t recycled because only certain types can be recycled. Most bottles usually end up in the ocean or landfills, leaving dangerous chemicals all around our environment. They are also invading our clean society, with litter in parks, streets, sidewalks, etc. Even if you chop them up into tiny pieces, they still take longer than a human lifetime to decompose.

By using containers such as stainless steel and canteens we are eliminating the excess pollution of bottles thus eliminating plastic toxins. Granted water bottles are convenient for school and travel. There are many reasons why water bottles are a good thing. One reason being they are so often used it would be a nuisance trying to get rid of them. " Much of the water you see on the shelves is purified or drinking water.

The individual components of the bottled water supply chain that contribute significantly to the industry 's carbon footprint are apparent in the entire process of creating bottled water. During extraction and production oil is used to create the plastic bottles. Then energy is required to ship the bottles across the globe. Lastly, disposal of the bottles is an issue as the majority of them ends up in landfills in which they will remain for thousands of years, or they are put into incinerators which releases toxins into the air.

The main issue with bottled water is the effect it has on the environment. Plastic bottles are drastically increasing the size of landfills and can take up to five hundred years to decompose. At the rate plastic

Bottled water is probably the biggest scandal since Jordan Belfort was a penny stock broker. We pay extra for something that is convenientconvnant for us, but inturn is hurting ourare planet. We try to help by recycling, but still 38 billion plastic bottles made it to the landfills in 2010 and since then the numbers have just kept rising.In 2013, 10,130.3 million gallons of bottled water were produced in the United States, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp.(page #) Depending on who you ask, that’s either proof that more Americans are turning away from sugary soft drinks, or an environmental and ethical problem.

Water bottles are a staple in today’s society. In his article, “Costly water: Bottled and Sold: The History Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water,” author Martin W. Lewis quotes Peter H. Gleick when he says that, “Consumers buy bottled water for four main reasons: safety, taste, style, and convenience,” and he’s absolutely right (Par. 9). Bottled water is cleaner, healthier, and more convenient than tap water. More people are more apt to grab a bottle of water on the go, rather than fill a reusable bottle from the sink. It’s just easy. At least, that’s what we are led to believe. Bottled water is constantly in battle with its not-so-lavish counterpart, tap water. Some will even argue that the benefits of bottled water alone outweigh the cost. They, however, do not. The fact is, water bottles have plagued society for years and have become a growing menace to our environment and our people.

According to The Water Project, “Bottles used to package water take over 1,000 years to bio-degrade and if incinerated, they produce toxic fumes. It is estimated that over 80% of all single-use water bottles used in the U.S. simply become ‘litter’” (“Bottled Water is Wasteful”). This fact is not the only reason I believe that bottled water does not outweigh its costs. Although statistics show that bottled water is efficient, there are many reasons to believe otherwise.

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

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

Everyday millions of people will reach for a bottle of water, not thinking about the effects it can have on many aspects of their life and others. Bottled water may seem innocent but it needs to be treated with extreme care and caution. Even though bottled water may seem safe, it could contain many toxins. By drinking from a plastic water bottle, people should consider if it is really worth the cost of paying for the actual bottle itself. People should also consider the long term effects it can have on the earth as well as the effects it can have on the human body. Bottled water has always gave the impression of being cost efficient and safe, but when put to the test are they harming people more than what is suspected of the so called harmless water bottle?

Plastic bottles are one of the most common litter issues. Plastic bottles litter the land and waters of Earth. More than half a billion bottles of water are purchased in the U.S. every week, this is enough to circle the globe five times. Oil is used to make plastic bottles and ship them across the world. Enough oil is used making plastic bottles each year to fuel one million cars. Then, eighty percent of the bottles end up in landfills where they sit for thousands of years. Some of the bottles we think are being recycled are actually just being shipped to other countries and thrown in their backyards (“The Story”). By reducing the amount of plastic bottles used, this would clean up our environment and preserve our Earth.