How green is bottled water?

The production of 31.2 billion liters of water for the U.S. bottled water market took roughly 17.6 million barrels of oil.

What goes into bottled water

The simple break down is 3.4 megajoules of energy to produce a water bottle, cap and packaging with a barrel of oil producing about 6 thousand megajoules. Taking those numbers into account you arrive at 17.6 million barrels of oil, enough oil to run 1.5 million cars on U.S. roadways for an entire year.

Chemical contamination

It's not the water in bottled water that contians toxins it's the bottle used to transport it to the supermatket shelves. Most are made from PETE or PET which is code 1 (safe for single use) If these bottles are reused or if water is stored in them for a long period, chemicals can leach out into the water.

Lifetime embodied energy

33,200 tons of co2 are preduced by the british bottled water industry. It's not unusual for a bottle of water to travel up to 1600km. Add on the production of the plastic bottle and energy to filter and bottle and you have a huge co2 footprint.

Factoids [0]

ADD A FACTIOD (If you know a fact about bottled water, use the form below to let us know. This page is open.)
(*)indicates required fields
author (*) :
source :
comment (*) :

This page as been viewed 320 times