Disaster in a Bottle

by Randy

With global sales of $100 billion and average yearly growth of 10 per cent, the bottled water industry is one of the great marketing stories of our time. Only oceans of spin could persuade us to pay handsomely for something that we can get from the tap, virtually free.

"Bottled water is a disaster, for several reasons," Jeff Angel, from the Total Environment Centre, says. "First there's the issue of the sustainability of underground aquifers, from where much of the bottled water is drawn. And then there's the carbon footprint. Water is heavy, and transporting it around the world uses a lot of energy."

Then there's the packaging. The most commonly used material for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. According to Larsen, 2.7 million tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year. Though PET is made for recycling, nine out of 10 such bottles in the United States end up in landfill - roughly 30 million a day - where they can take up to 1000 years to biodegrade. In Australia, just 35 per cent of PET bottles are recycled.

"Bottled water is a classic example of the market ignoring the environmental cost of the product," Angel says. "Free trade is meant to be good because you're getting cheaper products from another country, but of course this never takes into account the environmental cost."

In the US, some 40 per cent of bottled water is nothing more than purified tap water, but in Australia almost all comes from underground reservoirs, or aquifers. "Given how little we know about the sustainability of these aquifers, it's important that we tread carefully," Averil Bones, the freshwater policy manager for WWF, says.

All this proves how little we know and how little we care about water,

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Eco section
Randy