Environmental Impact
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Bottled |
Eco-friendly - no bottles to recycle or dispose of. |
Fossil fuel consumption: Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels (SF Gate).
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No additional environmental costs outside of maintaining the water treatment plants. |
Increased greenhouse gasses and air pollution: Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels (Container Recycling Institute).
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Increased waste: More than 1 billion plastic water bottles end up in the California 's trash each year, taking up valuable landfill space, leaking toxic additives, such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to biodegrade. That means bottled water may be harming our future water supply (SF Gate). |
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Roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year (World Wide Fund for Nature). |
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90% of empty water bottles are not recycled. |
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Producing the bottles for American consumption required more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation (Pacific Institute). |
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Bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. |
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It took 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water. |