Bottled Water: the environment

There really shouldn’t be any doubt in people’s minds about the fact that bottled water is bad for the environment. It works out to roughly 1,000,000 tons of plastic that is being wasted unnecessarily. Approximately 70,000,000 PET bottles end up being dumped in North American landfills every year.
What most people do not think of is the production of this plastic and the transportation of this water (from one place with clean tap water to another with clean tap water). Last year alone, over 3 billion litres of oil was used to make the bottles. This does not include the transportation of the bottles after they are produced. That is equivalent to adding over 1.5 million cars to the road.
Then there is the energy required to produce these bottles. It takes around 3.4 megajoules to make a typical one-litre plastic bottle, cap and packaging. Using the average annual household energy consumption for the US in 2001, this works out to the same amount of energy as 3.2 million households for a year.