Overwhelmed by swelling landfills (in the U.S., 86 per cent of used water bottles end up as garbage or litter, rather than being recycled), in November, Chicago placed a five cent tax on every bottle of water sold in the city to discourage consumption.
In an effort to regain consumer confidence, municipalities are working hard to promote the purity and safety of tap water. More than a quarter of bottled water is, in fact, processed tap water, including popular brands Aquafina and Coca-Cola's Dasani. U.S. sales of bottled water are growing by 10 per cent each year, with consumers spending more per gallon of bottled water of dubious origin than on a gallon of gasoline.
Bottled water is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made and delivered with fossil fuels. Seventeen million barrels of crude oil per year are needed to manufacture the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the U.S. All told, the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the U.S. is over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Europeans, however, lead the world in per person consumption of bottled water, with Italy followed by the U.A.E., Mexico, France, Belgium, Germany and Spain. Local governments are concluding that the $100 billion spent on bottled water each year around the world could be put to better use in creating and maintaining public water infrastructure, including for the estimated one billion people lacking access to safe, reliable water.
February 2008
