We use (almost) enough bottled water to fill the Rose Bowl every day

Image courtesy The Story of Stuff Project
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Yesterday, in Would you pay $10,000 for a sandwich?, we discovered just how costly those handy bottles of water we suck on throughout the day really are.

Not only do we pay 2000 times the cost of tap water, or about $8/gallon when we buy a 16 ounce bottle, we also make a really big mess. Tons of our bottles clutter our parks and streets and gutters. Eventually they flow into our rivers and oceans, where they kill wildlife. Megatons more go directly to the landfill. Only about a third are recycled. But whoa, Annie Leonard, in her video, The Story of Bottled Water, showed us that even those recycled bottles turn up in China and India, where we ship them to get them out of our hair. There, mountains of plastic bottles, a fraction of which are recycled into new plastic kitsch, clutter the landscape, unusable.

What Leonard didn't mention is how much H₂O it takes to make that bottle of water we guzzle and pitch. That's where Pasadena and the Rose bowl come in. Here's the quick and dirty.

According to Brian Merchant on TreeHugger last year, manufacturers use almost 2 gallons (1.85 to be exact) to make a single plastic water bottle. That doesn't count the 16 ounces of water we actually drink. Considering that every second of every day, 1,000 people open a bottle of water in the United States, that comes to 1850 gallons a second, or 159,840,000 gallons every 24 hours. That's enough to supply the thirsty City of Pasadena five times and almost enough to fill up the Rose Bowl. (You'll need to scroll down quite a ways to find their blurbs on that link, but they're there.)

Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy and open up a plastic bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day in the United States, a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day. More than thirty billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars.

Peter Gleick in Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water (2010)
as quoted by Annie Leonard in
The Story of Bottled Water, fn #6 (pdf)

That's one more reason to carry our own refillable water bottle everywhere we go. Have you switched yet? It's the Ordinary thing to do.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Would you pay $10,000 for a sandwich?

Image courtesy The Story of Stuff Project
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Bonkers, right? Yet every time we buy a bottle of water, according to Story of Stuff legend Annie Leonard, we are paying 2000 times the cost of tap water. That's like paying $10,000 for a sandwich, she says.

What's worse, like as not, that bottled water is no more pure, perhaps less so, than the water from your tap. And taste? In taste tests, people almost always pick the tap water over the bottled.

Between 10 and 15 percent of the price of a bottle of water goes to cover advertising costs. We not only buy their myths, it turns out we pay extra for them.

Bottled Water Myth Versus Reality

Why do we buy bottled water, anyway?

The idea that bottled water not only tastes better but is safer to drink came from, (Guess who!), Madison Avenue. That's right. Leonard says these are just two of the myths we've been sold to get us to carry around our very own bah-bahs, sucking on them like babies everywhere we go. Not that drinking water isn't important to our health and well-being. Conventional wisdom has it that we need eight glasses of the pure, sparkling stuff every day.

Half a billion bottles a week in U.S. alone

But do we need to contribute half a billion bottles every week to the waste stream? That's the U.S. number--enough to circle the globe five times. Every. Single. Week. All plastic. (Reminder: Every piece of plastic ever manufactured exists today.)

Get the whole story here, in Leonard's inimitable style, sure to draw a belly laugh or two.



This is just one of the reasons I carry a refillable water bottle. It's a conscious choice, and it helps bring us just a little closer to a sustainable lifestyle, and a healthy planet, more like the world of Ordinary.

What do you think? Are you carrying your own reusable bottle these days? What other conscious choices are you making to assure we leave the Earth a little better than we found it?

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.