The hidden cost of our bottled water addiction

Plastic

Most of us in 2020, are aware of the issues.

There is more and more plastic waste each year. The majority is never recycled.

Most of think of those things that hit the news. Plastic bags, food packaging, and Styrofoam cups for example.

There is a much bigger contributor to this issue, one that is never considered.

Bottled water.

There are over 50 billion 1 liter bottles of water sold each year globally.

That’s a huge amount of plastic waste. I get it, in lots of places either the tap water is unsafe, or confidence in it is low.

Consuming bottled water in 1-liter bottles, while convenient is killing the environment.

So what’s the solution?

It depends on where in the world you are.

Bottled water will never go away. There simply isn’t access to clean drinking water for us all at the source.

But if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with clean and safe drinking water. I’ll use Scotland as an example. Why would you pay for water that comes from the same place as the stuff coming out of your tap?

The sad fact remains that most of those 50 billion bottles consumed are by people with no access to safe water.

One solution is, we increase water carrier size to 3 gallons or 13.5 liters and make those returnable for reuse.

If we did that then the total amount of plastic bottles required would reduce by over 90% to 3.7 billion.

Those same bottles can be recycled material. They can also be reused many times.

If we adopted this strategy. We could avoid one of the real issues in the environment today which is becoming harder to solve each year.

Water is the stuff of life. It’s essential for our survival.

The issue is that because we have to package water to be consumed outside of the tap water system, we create waste.

Plastic waste in the environment is a growing issue. There are some solutions to it. But what always surprises me are some of the hidden causes.

Bottled water is a great example of that!

Humans solve problems, we adapt and we change. We solved the water problem for a lot of the world, the next step is to solve the plastic waste issue that comes with it.