Cassandra’s no-brainer. If we care about plastic waste, why won’t we stop drinking bottled water?

Before buying your next bottled water please consider the following facts first:

• Most of the bottled water you buy is just glorified tap water. There are a few brands whose water really comes from springs and mountain streams, but most are just tap water that’s been purified.
• Only 1 out of 5 plastic bottles is recycled. The rest just becomes litter or get buried somewhere (1).
• It takes 1 PET plastic bottle 700 years to start decomposing. Bacteria, which usually helps in breaking down organic materials, don’t like petroleum based plastics. Technically, they can last forever.
• More than 100 million plastic bottles are used worldwide every day (2).
• 3 liters of water is used to package 1 bottle of water.
• Plastic water bottles are petroleum based. In the U.S alone, it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to meet the demands.
• An estimate 1,500 plastic bottles end up as waste in landfills or thrown in the ocean every second.
• There’s an area in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas – known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – which is ‘paved’ by plastic (2).

References

1. http://thewaterproject.org/bottled_water_wasteful.asp 
2. http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/how-long-does-it-take-for-plastics-to-biodegrade.htm 

Water is life and – if produced safely – the best beverage to drink. But where in the world is it safe to drink tap water? This picture highlights the safest places – and where you shouldn’t drink tap water (Courtesy: Globehunters).

More country-specific info, including which vaccines and medicines to take, can be found on CDC’s page: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/list

Even if you’re not concerned about the environment, then Simon Usborne still hits the nail on the head (www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/28/if-we-care-about-plastic-waste-why-wont-we-stop-drinking-bottled-water):

“For all the innovation and choice that define the food and drink industries, if you want to make money, you could do a lot worse than bung some water in a bottle and flog it. A litre of tap water, the stuff we have ingeniously piped into our homes, costs less than half a penny. A litre of bottled water can cost well over a pound, especially for something fancy that has been sucked through a mountain.”