A commercial for a bottled water brand claims that they package water from the melting glaciers. This water has lived in the form of ice for over a century and still so fresh, it claims. But the label of the bottle declares its date of expiry. Yet, this is not the ultimate irony.

Each packaged water bottle is taking the water closer to its expiry – its extinction. When you buy one bottle of water, you have wasted six bottles of water that went into manufacturing it. This is the beginning of a horror story that we all have contributed to gladly.

The storm brewing in a bottle

Bottled water unfortunately has been growing by leaps and bounds while depleting its own natural source. There are 50 billion water bottles consumed every year, about 30 billion of them in the US alone. Americans consume 60% of the world’s water bottles despite being only 4.5% of the world population. 1,500 water bottles are consumed per SECOND in the U.S.

What’s worse, this is unnecessary. Clean drinking tap water is available in most developed and developing countries – where the consumption of bottled water is the highest. Our totally unnecessary addiction to bottled water is vomiting about 20 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Imagine, this is equivalent to the monthly output of CO2 from powering 20 million homes.

We are causing deaths of species every year

How we wish our consumption of bottled water would have ended in the above estimate so we could sleep more peacefully tonight. Alas, we are disposing them carelessly too.

Look  at this photograph closely and the famous CNN video that came out a few years ago about sea birds dying due to plastic consumption. Plastic bottle tops are currently not recyclable. Along with plastic bags, they are dumped into the ocean and go straight into the stomachs of a variety of bird and animal species who mistake them for food. This is the picture of an albatross that was recently found dead on a Hawaiian island. He had a stomach full of 119 bottle caps.

We think we are guarding our health

There’s plenty of evidence to show bottled water is worse for you than tap water. And if you think the latter is harmful, well so is the former. Research has shown that plastic has a tendency of leaching into the water it holds. This has been linked to health problems related to reproduction and kinds of cancer. Worse, there’s hormone-disrupting material called phthalates that leach into the bottled water that we drink within just 10 weeks of storage. This can speed up if the bottles have been kept in the sun (the way they are kept inside the car).

Yes, tap water is not entirely safe but it doesn’t have long-term health effects while its purity varies from one place to another. New York City has the cleanest tap water in America while several regions in developing countries draw water from closed wells.

So really what’s the verdict?

• Bottled water is more expensive
• It has long-term health consequences
• It is harming our environment, depleting water itself
• It’s killing our species. 

Why do we need this? Bottled water is a venom that needs to be wiped off of our planet. It starts from that one bottle of water that we may choose to not buy today.

END