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 |  Subject: How plastic bottled water is harming you and the environment  Sun 18 Nov 2012, 10:46 | |
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How plastic bottled water is harming you and the environment(NaturalNews)
As soda sales leveled off in the U.S., multinational corporations like
PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Nestle found a cash cow in marketing bottled
water as the healthy alternative. Though blessed with an abundance of
clean water, the U.S. now consumes more bottled water than any other
country, piling up enough empty bottles to run the circumference of the
equator every 27 hours, and we do so at an unacceptable price to both
human health and the environment.
A feigned image of health
The
World Bank estimates the bottled water market at $800 billion, making
the prospect of a fraction of this fortune enough for companies to
salivate over. Marketing words like pristine, pure, and fresh, have been
used to describe bottled water, while undermining the perceived quality
of tap water. Yet, contamination issues have led to over 100 recalls on
bottled water in recent years. Unlike tap water, which is tested
hundreds of times a day and is under constant monitoring, bottled water
producers are not required to provide water quality reports. Bottled
water is not regulated, as the FDA has no jurisdiction on bottled water
sourced and sold in the same state, which is often mined from local
streams and lakes before being sold back to the public at a cost
thousands of times more than what they can readily get from their own
faucet.
Hazards on the environment
The hazards of bottled
water far outweigh its convenience. Small towns across the U.S. and
around the world are being exploited for water resources to feed the
manufactured demand of giant corporations selling public water and
commodifying a necessity of life. Furthermore, poor neighborhoods, often
in minority communities, are being poisoned by the toxic manufacturing
of plastic bottles.
According to the Environmental Working Group,
the annual manufacturing of plastic bottles for water alone in the U.S.
market takes as much oil as required to fuel a million cars. At the
consumer end, it is estimated that only one out of five bottles actually
gets recycled, with much of the rest polluting our fragile environment.
The throw-away bottled water
economy has a significant burden on its resource as well, where it is
estimated that two liters of water are needed to bottle every liter on
the store shelf, resulting in approximately 72 billion gallons wasted
annually worldwide.
Harzards on health
Producers of
bottled water are not required to offer water quality reports, leaving a
consumer to wonder what kind of filtering is actually occurring. In
third-party testing, bottled water
showed traces of bacteria, chemicals, fluoride, endocrine disruptors
such as BPA and PETE (or PET). In fact, whether the filtering process is
pure or not does not exclude some of these chemicals since the process
of storing the water in the PET plastic water bottles (especially after
being exposed to heat during transportation and storage) infuses the
water with leaching from the plastic. The fact is plain and simple: in
the majority of counties across the U.S., local tap water is safer than
the plastic-laced water bought for insanely inflated prices.
A clearer path ahead
Given
its ease and convenience, it takes commitment and planning to
relinquish the costly addiction to bottled water. Nonetheless, it must
be done for the sake of our own health, the health of others, and for
the sake of our fragile, over-polluted environment.
A healthier alternative would be to install a good quality filter in
the home and use non-plastic, reusable water bottles. If a need arises,
glass-bottled spring water is a better choice as it is bottled at the
source and is naturally filtered underground.
Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/038003_bottled_water_plastic_environment.html | |
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