The Cost of Bottled Water

You may have seen a number of other articles and video clips throughout your social media feed recently telling you to stop drinking bottled water. This has grabbed my attention a couple of times and each time I read it I understand a little more about the detrimental effects of bottled water. With over 200 billion bottles of water (not including plastic milk cartons, soft drink bottles etc.) being consumed each year we need to take a look at the environmental impact and cost to resources this process has.

Oil Consumption

Of the 200 billion used bottles each year, 176 billion of the end up in landfills or the ocean. This added to the waste already in our oceans, 5.25 trillion pieces of trash and counting, as of January last year. It also takes 17 million barrels of oil a year to make these disposable water bottles, a process that then also consumes 3 times the amount of water that would fill the bottle it produces. A further 50 million barrels of oil are estimated to be used on the pumping, processing, transportation and refrigeration of the bottled water.

And all this is only the tip of the iceberg, check out the infographic below, if you want to learn more about efforts being made to clean our oceans check out the Ocean Cleanup Project.