Is tap or bottled water better? For some time now we have been led to believe that tap water is bad while bottled water is good. However this is not the case in terms of our health and it is most certainly not the case in terms of the environment.
Bottled water versus tap water. Image taken from http://today.duke.edu/2011/03/takebacktap.html
Every year Australians spend more than half a billion dollars buying bottled water and, more often than not, the quality of the bottled water is the same as tap water but is 1000 times more expensive and 1000 times more damaging to the environment.
How could bottled water could be bad for the environment, especially if you drink the ‘pristine spring water’ and then reuse the bottle?
Well to start with, reusing the plastic bottle can be bad for your health because of the BPA used in the plastic, and unlike tap water the quality of bottled water isn’t regulated.
The next problem is the amount of energy required to produce bottled water. To make bottled water, energy is required to produce the bottle, fill it, transport it, refrigerate it, recycle it and dispose of it, meanwhile the process is also omitting toxins into the air. In order to produce a 1000 ml bottle of water 200 ml of oil is required. So if you were to fill your plastic bottle with oil to the quarter point, this would roughly be the amount of oil used to produce your bottle of water.
Producing bottled water not only requires a lot of energy but it also needs a lot of water. For every litre of bottled water produced and sold, 2 litres of water was used in its production.
“But,” I hear you cry, “I recycle!”. In Australia only 36% of all PET plastic drink bottles are recycled and the rest ends up in landfills or as litter. It can take more than 100 years for PET plastics to decompose and in the process it releases toxins like PET and BPA, which are detrimental to human and animal health.
I won’t lie to you, I used to be one of those people who would only drink bottled water. When I lived on the goldfields we had a large rainwater tank and we would only drink rainwater and never tap water. So when we moved to the southwest I refused to drink tap water because I thought that bottled water was better. However I was very much mistaken and soon realised that rainwater was definitely not the same as bottled water and although there was a huge difference between rainwater and tap water there really wasn’t any difference at all between tap water and bottled water, apart from the fact that bottled water was bad for the environment.
My advice? Avoid buying bottled water unless you really, really have to and if you do have to, make sure you recycle the bottle. Even better, invest in a good quality, purpose designed, re-usable water bottle. There’s a huge variety of reusable bottles available these days and many also keep your water cold.
Below I’ve listed some sites relating to this topic (including sources for my information) but there are heaps more online if you are interested to learn more.
- Water Bottle Pollution Facts
- Is your Bottled Water Making You Stupid?
- Think Reusable Bottles, Forget Plastic Bottled Water
- Go Tap
- 15 Outrageous Facts About the Bottled Water Industry
- 5 Reasons not to Drink Bottled Water
- Clean Up Australia – Bottled Water
- The Facts about Bottled Water
- Save Water
- Bisphenol A (BPA)
