The Trouble with Bottled Water

Worldwide some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

Manufacturing the 29 billion plastic water bottles for the U.S. each year requires enough oil to fuel over 1 million U.S. cars for a year and generates more than 2.5 million tons of CO2.

About 86% of plastic water bottles in the U.S. become garbage or litter. In 2005, this amounted to 2 million tons of water bottles going to landfills.

Plastic debris in the environment can take between 400 and 1,000 years to degrade.

In 2006, the equivalent of 2 billion half-liter bottles of water were shipped to U.S. ports. Think of all the oil used and CO2 produced just to transport this water.

With $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in the U.S., the United States municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.

FDA rules for bottled water are dramatically weaker than those set by the EPA for tap water.

More than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, with often the only difference being added minerals that have no clear health benefit.

Bottled water is over twice as expensive as gasoline and up to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water.

Baltimore City Bureau of Solid Waste spends over $5 million per year cleaning up litter, much of which consists of water bottles. Discarded water bottles = your tax dollars being thrown away.

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