Bottled Water - Pointless (or worse) and bad for the planet

My friend Paul sent me an article from Reader's Digest about Bottled Water. It's shocking to be reminded that bottled water is often drawn from the same source as tap water, and indeed, when from other sources it can be lower quality than tap water.

These statistics are pretty shocking too...

Bottled Water’s Environmental Toll
Eco Footprint
• The energy used each year making the bottles needed to meet the demand for bottled water in the United States is equivalent to more than 17 million barrels of oil. That's enough to fuel over 1 million cars for a year.

• If water and soft drink bottlers had used 10% recycled materials in their plastic bottles in 2004, they would have saved the equivalent of 72 million gallons of gasoline. If they had used 25%, they would have saved enough energy to electrify more than 680,000 homes for a year.

• In 2003, the California Department of Conservation estimated that roughly three million water bottles are trashed every day in that state. At this rate, by 2013 the amount of unrecycled bottles will be enough to create a two-lane highway that stretches the state’s entire coast.

• In 2004 the recycling rate for all beverage containers was 33.5 percent. If it reached 80 percent, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would be the equivalent of removing 2.4 million cars from the road for a year.

• That bottle that takes just three minutes to drink can take up to a thousand years to biodegrade.

Sources: Earth Policy Institute, As You Sow, Container Recycling Institute.