It’s hot, it’s humid, and Canadians are about to get a few degrees warmer yet this summer. With temperatures rising, I can bet that many of us will refresh ourselves with a little h20, but as you’re reaching into the cooler at your local grocery store, think about this, is bottled water really better than what’s coming out of the tap, and more importantly, what is this industry doing to our environment?
The bottled water industry may mean big business in Canada, but in terms of sustainability, bottled water is sucking us dry. Depending on where you live in Canada, bottled water is anywhere from two hundred and forty to ten thousand times more expensive than tap water, and what most people don’t know is this; bottled water is no better than what’s coming out of the tap. In fact, the bottled water industry is even less regulated than our public water infrastructure, meaning that while commercials try to convince us that bottled water is a premium product, it’s no healthier and certainly not safer than what we have access to for free! Something that we have already paid for through municipal taxes and that has been hardwired into our homes is now being treated as a commodity and is being bought and sold. Aside from hurting our wallets, the privatization of bottled water may mean that some people around the globe could eventually be denied access to clean, safe drinking water, which in my opinion, is a basic human right. And aside from all that, it’s actually damaging our ecosystems.
Bottled water is the single largest area among all soft drinks and beverages, and lately, has been seen as more of a luxury item than a necessity. While you might not think that the packaged bottle of water you had with lunch could be that detrimental to the environment, approximately forty million bottles a day are ending up in the trash, and the amount of waste that is being produced is enough to make an impact not only in Canada, but globally.
Every day, companies like Nestle and Coca-cola pump millions of gallons of water from the earth, bottle it, ship it and sell it back to Canadians for nearly ten thousand times the cost of tap water. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t agree with paying ten thousand times the price of something that is hardwired into our homes, but that’s what the makers of bottled water are doing. Most simply put, it’s bad for public water systems, it’s bad for taxpayers, and most importantly, it’s bad for the environment.
Consider this; the amount of oil that is used to make plastic water bottles each year is enough to fuel approximately one million bottles, and it takes even more energy to ship that packaged product around the planet. Eighty percent of the bottles end up in landfills where they will sit for thousands of years, or they end up in incinerators, releasing toxic chemicals and pollutants into the environment.
As a whole, Canadians are consuming way too much plastic, and even though some of us try to recycle those plastic bottles, there is a chance that it won’t get recycled anyway because we’re making so much of it that recycling plants can’t keep up with us. The few bottles that you might consume a day don’t seem to make an impact, but think about how much extra plastic is wasted each year as a result of packaged bottles of water. It’s nearly seven billion pounds! The plastic water bottle is something that Canadians have begun to take for granted, and often disregard as a threat to our environment. The production of plastic water bottles has released toxins into the environment, contributing to global warming.
Additionaly, the plastic that is used to produce the millions of litres of bottled water that Canadians drink each year is now at such a volume that it cannot be contained strictly in landfills, and much of this waste ends up in the world’s major oceans, presenting a big risk to marine life. The amount of plastic drinking water bottles that has accumulated in our major bodies of water has increased significantly over the last several years, and by producing such an excess of plastic, we’ve managed to quickly poison the oceans that feed us and sustain us. Many birds and fish mistake this garbage as food, putting these species in danger.
One hundred million marine mammals are killed every year by plastic in the ocean, and if that doesn’t scare you, think about the fact that oceans drive our climate and weather. Plastic is killing the ocean, and is poisoning the fish that we eat. Thanks to the excess of plastic bottles being tossed every day, fish that we eat have likely ingested contaminated plastic, which means that we are indirectly injesting plastic. So when you toss that plastic water bottle, it doesn’t just end there, the consequences are so far reaching that they don’t just affect the environment, they affect our health.
Most of the oxygen in our atmosphere is actually generated by the sea, and by poisoning our water sources with so much waste, we’re actually polluting the air that we breathe, and poisoning ourselves. So while we don’t think twice about downing a bottle of dasani, the effects of millions of us doing this are so far reaching that perhaps we should consider using the tap. Why waste plastic on something that already comes out of our faucets for free.
But if you don’t believe me about the impact that bottled water has on our environment, just consider how it ended up at the store in the first place. First of all, there is a giant pollutant factory that converts oil into plastic pellets, and then you take those plastic pellets and ship them off to another big smoky factory which makes pellets into plastic, and then you take the plastic and put it on a truck to ship it to another factory where they fill it with water. Then you take those plastic bottles, put caps on them and cover them with more plastic, which isn’t even recyclable. To top it all of, it’s sitting on a bunch of cardboard that came from a different factory all together.
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