If you are upset by the oil spill caused by BP in the Gulf of Mexico, you may not want to read this.  

An advocacy group called Corporate Accountability International estimates that 17 million barrels of oil were required last year to make the water bottles that were produced for drinking water in the United States.  

Let’s put those 17 million barrels of oil in perspective by comparing it to the ”environmental disaster” that is taking place in the Gulf of Mexico.  While the estimates of the size of the spill seem to be increased every week, it is now assumed that about 1 to 2 million barrels have leaked into the Gulf.   

While some may say that the environmental catastrophe of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is much worse than the problems created by bottled water, I would disagree.  The creation of water bottles uses up the same amount of oil every three weeks, year after year after year.  That’s right, every three weeks.  While much of the oil problem will float to the surface and evaporate or be skimmed off the water and beaches in the next few months, the plastic bottles will remain for approximately 450 years.  People that are effected by the spill are really angry with BP, and for good reason.  However, those same people continue to create far worse damage to their environment every day and nobody seems to care. 

Here is another way of looking at it.  It takes about the same amount of oil to make the bottles for disposable bottled in the USA as it would to operate 100,000 automobiles from American roads.  People are paying hundred of millions of dollars to drink water that is inferior to the water that they can drink from their taps, and they are consuming huge amounts of oil to produce the bottles.  Hmmm.

Now that you know the environmental cost of making the disposable bottles for drinking water, let’s take a look at the environmental cost of disposing of the bottles.  We ignore the problem of disposing plastic water bottles because they are recylable….right?.  How bad could it really be if we recycle?  Pretty bad.  Most of don’t realize that 10 billion plastic water bottles end up in our landfill sites each year (don’t forget to take the caps off the bottles before carrying them to the end of your driveway in your recycle boxes, or the bottles won’t get recycled).   That means about 30 plastic water bottles end up in our landfills each year for every man, woman, and child.    

Still not bothered by this?  Try this for a visual.  If you lined up the empty bottles created each year in the USA that end up in our landfill sites, they would stretch from New York to Los Angeles approximately 200 times.   Need another example?  How about 5,000 olympic sized swimming pools filled with plastic water bottles, or a pile that would cover Manhattan Island….every year….and they last for 450 years…each

Stop drinking bottled water.  It is very harmful to our environment.  

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and the quoted sources.

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