Nowadays, a lot of people buy bottled water. Surely not everyone thinks about the energy miles that the bottle has traveled to reach the supermarket.
Did you know, for example, that for every ton of PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) produced, 3 tons of carbon dioxide are released? Energy is required to fill bottles with water, and also for the process of transportation, refrigeration, recycling and disposal of water bottles. We can visually represent the energy embodied in a water bottle by filling one quarter of the bottle with oil. This is because it can take 250mL of oil to produce 1L of bottled water. According to a 2001 report of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year.
Spring water is extracted from natural sources. Other bottled water is simply water from the municipal water supply that has been subjected to additional treatment.
Consumers may claim that bottled water is convenient and that it tastes better than tap water. This is without forgetting that it is presented as the healthy alternative to sugared drinks. But the health arguments for bottled water are overstated. The choice is not one between sugared drinks and bottled water, but between bottled water and tap water. Bottled water is costly: both for the wallet and for the environment. We closely monitor the price of petrol, but are prepared to pay twice as much for a liter of bottled water than we pay for a liter of petrol to fuel our cars.
There are many interesting initiatives which highlight how the transport of bottled water can be a considerable source of damage to the environment. For example The Story of Bottled Water, released March 22 2010 on storyofbottledwater.org, employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. It is worth checking out their unique website at http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/about/.
FIJI Water is an interesting example of an ethical company; it has done a lot of research to disclose the carbon footprint of its products. They’ve joined the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration, and launched a new website at Fijigreen.com in support of their efforts to become carbon negative. Following the notion that measurement is the first key step to managing emissions, a bottled water company is branding itself green!
There are several surveys made to understand how the transport of bottled water impacts the environment. It is interesting to know that Pet-bottled water requires three transportation phases:
1. pet-preforms and raw materials transportation from producing sites to bottling plant:
- by trucks;
- average distance: 200 km;
- average fuel consumption (diesel): 3 km/L
2. Packaged bottles transportation from bottling plant to stores:
- by train (18%) and by trucks (82%);
- average distance: based on each company’s market and plant location;
- average trucks fuel consumption (diesel): 3 km/L
3. Packaged bottles (18 each time) transportation from stores to final user’s site:
- by gasoline car (50%) or diesel car (50%);
- average distance: 10 km;
- average fuel consumption: 12 km/L (gasoline) and 15 km/L (diesel)
source: http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/about/
In order to have a better understanding of the process and the long and expensive and damaging travel of a water bottle before it actually gets on the shelf of your local supermarket , read the amusing and unique story we have posted: The Story of a Water Bottle Episode 1.
