Plastics Purge Part III: Reusable Water Bottles to the Rescue!

Greener Living’s Plastics Purge Series continues here with Part III. If you haven’t yet had the chance, be sure to check out previous posts in the series, including Part I  on disposable plastic shopping bags and Part II on single-use plastic straws.

In this week’s post, I’ll be delving into an additional source of unnecessary, avoidable plastic waste: single-use, disposable plastic water bottles—a topic near and dear to my heart.

In an alarming trend of disposability, roughly 40 percent of the now more than 448 million tons of plastic produced every year is disposable. This is according to a National Geographic article by Laura Parker, which details the problematic nature of our dependence on plastics.  Globally, only 18 percent of plastic is recycled, up from nearly zero percent in 1980. Even though plastic bottles are one of the most widely recycled products, they are still a serious contributor to our global plastics pollution problem. They are also seriously unsustainable in their oil and water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and prevalence in landfills.

Last year alone, Americans used a staggering 50 billion plastic water bottles. With bottled water consumption reaching an all-time high in the United States and other parts of the world, the time to act is now.

Although it is easy to demonize plastic water bottles from an environmental standpoint, I would like to first acknowledge that plastic water bottles can serve a vital function in bringing safe drinking water to people who don’t have it. However, in the context of addressing superfluous waste in our everyday lives, the unnecessary nature of single-use plastic water bottles applies to those of us with access to clean, safe drinking water.

People with access to clean, safe drinking water who choose to utilize bottled water instead of tap water typically do so as a matter of convenience, status symbol, preference in taste, or perceived increase in health benefits or safety.

However, in both the US and Canada, tap water has more strict safety regulations than bottled water. Additionally, 45% of all bottled water is actually sourced from the tap, and, in instances of blind taste tests, the majority of people choose tap water as the better tasting alternative to bottled brands.

As for the matters of status and convenience, in a perfect world the sheer unsustainability of the bottled water industry would render the use of such a product as socially stigmatizing and unacceptable. Likewise, the few extra minutes in a day it takes to refill a reusable bottle from a tap or water fountain are far less costly than the alarming environmental ramifications of a continued reliance on single-use plastics.

Environmentally, single-use plastic water bottles are incredibly costly, requiring unsustainable levels of energy and resource input in their manufacturing, transportation, and disposal. For example, the manufacturing of a plastic water bottle requires three times the amount of water needed to fill it. Furthermore, the production of plastic water bottles requires up to 17 million barrels of oil and releases 2.5 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Resources are needed to transport the bottled water as well, using additional fossil fuels and releasing additional greenhouse gases in the process, with some estimates finding that it takes 76 million barrels of oil annually to produce, transport, store, and dispose of the plastic bottles used in the US. That's enough oil to fuel 4.3 million cars for a year!

The water going into the bottles poses additional environmental concerns, as this water is often being sourced and harvested from water-scarce or water-insecure regions such as drought-plagued California and Fiji, ultimately draining local water supplies and framing access to healthy drinking water as a commodity rather than a human right.

The disposal of plastic water bottles poses yet another environmental concern. Each year, as little as 12-30% of plastic water bottles end up being recycled. The rest end up in landfills where it can take up to 1000 years for the plastic to decompose. Moreover, those bottles that are sent into the recycling stream aren’t truly recycled, but are instead often shipped to China where they are “downcycled” and converted into fabric, rugs, and clothing which requires additional fossil fuel use and energy inputs. 

With energy-intensive manufacturing, packaging, and transportation processes, low recycling rates, and inefficient recycling processes, the best thing we can do for the environment when it comes to bottled water it to avoid it altogether.

In addition to the positive environmental impacts associated with avoiding single-use, disposable plastic water bottles, your wallet will thank you too, as utilizing a reusable water bottle can result in significant financial savings. On average, a reusable water bottle costs anywhere from $5-$30. Single-use water bottles typically range in price from $1-$3. So although single-use plastic water bottles are cheaper at the individual price, they are much more expensive in the long run (both financially and environmentally). In fact, as clean energy provider Arcadia Power outlines in their blog post on reusable water bottles, you could save as much as $3,000 annually by using a reusable water bottle over single-use plastic ones—not to mention you'd be saving close to 1500 plastic bottles every year!!

In comparing the costs of bottled water vs. tap water, finance blogger Amy Livingston of Money Crashers cites data from both the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which points to bottled water being a staggering 600 times more expensive per gallon than tap water. Single-serve plastic bottles, which account for 65% of all bottled water sales, cost even more per gallon comparatively and are 3,785 times more expensive than what you’d pay for the same amount of water from a faucet.

Bottled water is expensive on an economic, environmental, and social scale. The ubiquity of bottled water and the power and influence of the big corporations that produce, market, and profit from the lucrative bottled water industry may seem overwhelming. However, you as an individual can make a difference by following these steps:
1. Avoid bottled water whenever possible.
2. Invest in a reusable water bottle. With so many different designs and styles out there, you can find a bottle that meets your needs and expresses your commitment to moving away from single-use plastics. Not sure where to start? Check out this list of the 26 Best Water Bottles of 2019.
3. If you do use a plastic water bottle, consider using it multiple times before making sure it finds its way into the recycling stream.
4. Don’t throw away plastic water bottles, as these will end up in landfills and take thousands of years to decompose.
5. Reduce your consumption of single-use plastic water bottles. Even cutting out as few as two single-use bottles per week prevents 104 items from polluting our planet every year.
6. Advocate for your friends, family, office, company, school, town, state, etc. to do away with single-use plastic water bottles. Learn more about how to raise awareness, educate others, and work toward enacting bottle bans at Ban the Bottle.

So, this week, let’s help out the environment by pledging to reduce our single-use plastic consumption. Literally, visit National Geographic’s Planet or Plastic? to pledge to cut out plastic bottles from your everyday life (along with other sources of single-use plastic). With the ability to customize your pledge, challenge your friends, and calculate the real impact of cutting down on single-use plastics, this tool is a great resource to help you say no to single-use plastics!

In the meantime, I wish you all a happy journey on your path toward greener living…
~Sam