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The facts about bottled water

Statistics, facts and information about bottled water.

Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce and transport the bottle

The energy we waste using bottled water would be enough to power 190,000 homes.

At as much as $2.50 [U.S.] per liter [$10 U.S. a gallon], bottled water costs more than gasoline

The high mineral content of some bottled waters makes them unsuitable for feeding babies and young children

Worldwide some 2.7 million tons (2.4 million metric tons) of plastic are used to bottle water each year. The plastic most commonly used is polyethylene terepthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil

Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year

About 86 percent of plastic water bottles in the U.S. become garbage or litter

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

Bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, the organization says, but it can be 10,000 times more expensive

The bottled water industry spends millions of dollars a year to convince us that their product is somehow safer or healthier than tap water, when in fact that's just not true

60 Million plastic bottles a day are disposed of in America alone

Massive amounts of greenhouse gases are produced from manufacturing the plastic bottles

It requires 3 times as much water to make the bottle as it does to fill it... it is an exceptionally wasteful industry

The plastic used in both single-use and reusable bottles can pose more of a contamination threat than the water. A safe plastic if used only once, #1 polyethylene terephthalate (PET or PETE) is the most common resin used in disposable bottles. However, as #1 bottles are reused, which they commonly are, they can leach chemicals such as DEHA, a possible human carcinogen, and benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a potential hormone disrupter

Unfortunately, for every six water bottles we use, only one makes it to the recycling bin. The rest are sent to landfills. Or, even worse, they end up as trash on the land and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Plastic bottles take many hundreds of years to disintegrate

Approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil—enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year—are used to make plastic water bottles, while transporting these bottles burns even more oil.

The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption in 2006 required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels (2,700,000 m3) of oil

Water is so heavy that the trucks that transport water are not able to carry a full load of bottles

A quarter of the 89 billion litres of water bottled worldwide annually are consumed outside their country of origin. Emissions of the green house gas carbon dioxide, caused by transporting bottled water within and between countries, contribute to the global problem of climate change

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