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More Facts ... and this is just 'bottles'
"In every corner of the globe, we are polluting, diverting, pumping, and wasting our limited supply of fresh water at an expediential level as population and technology grows. The rampant overdevelopment of agriculture, housing and industry increase the demands for fresh water well beyond the finite supply, resulting in the desertification of the earth". - "Blue Gold: World Water Wars"
In Bolivia nearly one out of every ten children will die before the age of five. Most of those deaths are related to illnesses that come from a lack of clean drinking water.
(Jim Schultz, founder of the Democracy Center in Bolivia)
The cost per person per year for having 10 liters of safe drinking water every day is just $2 USD.
(Ashok Gadgil, Senior Staff Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Bottled water which despite being past its peak, consumes roughly 17 million barrels of oil every year, not including transportation. The worst part of it is that that’s not even half the problem.
In addition to the 17 million barrels of oil (equivalent to ju st under the GDP of the Cayman Islands at today’s prices) used in production, bottled water consumes gallons and gallons of water.
Three gallons of the wet stuff is required to produce one gallon of what you will happily pay a dollar for, largely because of the length and complexity of the various “purification” processes and the evaporation loss that takes place while the water is in the plant. This is quite impactful, when juxtaposed to the fact that less than one percent of the water on our planet is both accessible and potable.
Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit.
Besides the extravagant amount of oil used to make the bottles and large volumes of water used in the bottling process, there are of course, several other considerations. Firstly, there are the transport costs - by the time you transport every bottle by rail or truck and keep it cool, you may as well have filled it one-fourth of the way with oil. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year.
Beyond that, there is also an environmental impact from production. This in fact, is quite simple to calculate: every ton of PET plastic for the bottles produces 3 tons of carbon–adding 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the 17 million barrels of oil.
Forty percent of bottled water should be labelled ‘bottled tap water’ because that is exactly what it is.
Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that around 4 million deaths each year can be attributed to water related disease, particularly cholera, hepatits, dengue fever, malaria and other parasitic disease.
More than 800 million people, 15% of the world population is malnourished, due in part to insufficient water for crop.
More people will die of diarreahl disease such as cholera, malaria than of HIV / AIDS combined.
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