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The Environmental
Impact of Plastic Water
Bottles And All You Need
to Know

There’s a lot of information circulating about the plastic pollution epidemic,

specifically, disposable single-use plastics. With alarming statistics and new
studies surfacing every day, we’ve decided to spotlight the issue with a
comprehensive write-up about the environmental impact of plastic water
bottles. This article breaks down everything you need to know about one of
the most popular disposable plastic items worldwide and the impact it has
on our planet.

It should come as no surprise that one of the most pressing environmental

issues we face is plastic pollution. In 2016, we consumed 400 billion plastic
water bottles around the globe, equivalent to 1 million plastic water bottles
per minute, or 20,000 bottles per second. Approximately only 9% of all
plastic gets recycled, while the remaining 91% ends up in landfills or leaches
into our oceans. In the US alone, we go through 50 billion plastic bottles per
year or 100 million plastic water bottles per day.

It can take over 400 years for plastic water bottles to biodegrade.
Microplastics (tiny plastic particles) breakdown and embed themselves in
our food chain as they are ingested by marine life-threatening larger
ecosystems and consequently, human health. Though plastic bottles are
convenient and sometimes necessary for clean water in rural areas, lack of
government oversight has lead to the proliferation of plastic disposables and
it has become an industry that has produced over 8.3 billion metric tons of
plastic in the last 6 decades, of which 6.3 billion tons has become plastic
waste.

Despite the fact that water bottles often ring in at two or three dollars a
piece – a high upcharge for something most can get for free – bottled water
is still perceived as the ‘cleanest’ way to drink water. This overconsumption
of plastic has led to excessive waste caused by littering, poor recycling
programs, and landfill spillover which some scientists predict will become as
serious a problem as climate change.

HOW MUCH PLASTIC IS IN THE

OCEAN?
It is estimated that there are 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating in our
oceans, spanning everything from plastic wrappers to microplastics that are
millimeters in size. Each year eight million tons of plastic gets dumped into
our oceans, the equivalent of filling five grocery bags worth of plastic waste
for each foot of coastline around the world.

If you are not familiar with the 5 gyres, they are systems of circulating ocean
currents around the world. One of these gyres, The North Pacific Gyre,
contains what’s known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ one of the
largest collections of plastic waste on our planet. This gyre swirls around
like a vortex – a sort of slow-moving whirlpool – scooping up marine debris
and plastic garbage along the way, most of which are small particles of
microplastics invisible to the naked eye. It covers an area now estimated to
be twice the size of Texas and spans 600,000 square miles. Just a few
weeks ago, The Ocean Cleanup – founded by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat –
launched a massive plastic cleaning device made of sections of floating
plastic pipes and nets that will trap debris floating near the surface. This
ambitious, although controversial project, has received criticism from
scientists worried that it may harm marine life – the jury is still out whether
this type of surface sweeping is effective and if it could remain a long-term
solution.

HOW DOE S PLASTIC AFFECT THE

OCEAN?
Plastic kills over 100,000 sea turtles and birds every year. Sea turtles are
currently consuming twice as much plastic as they did 25 years ago, and if
you are having a hard time visualizing this, here is a video of a sea turtle with
a straw lodged in its nostril that went viral a few years back. One in three
Laysan Albatrosses in the Midway Atoll are killed by consuming so much
plastic that it completely fills their stomach, resulting in malnutrition,
starvation, and death. Entanglement, in which an animal becomes trapped
by an object, is another major concern with plastic waste. Plastic water
bottles may act as an inadvertent trap or shelter for small fish and
crustaceans, while larger animals may not get stuck inside the bottles, they
do try to consume and break down anything that may contain prey. Even if
larger marine animals manage to avoid eating plastic, they’re often
consuming animals who have already ingested microplastics. These toxic
elements eventually work their way up the food chain while damaging all
forms of marine life.

W HAT ’S THE IMPACT OF PLASTIC

WATE R BOT TLE S ON HUMAN
HEALTH?
Our health is fundamentally linked to the oceans. Over 70% of the oxygen
produced in the atmosphere is produced from marine plants
(phytoplankton), despite the misconception that is primarily land-based
flora. The colossal amount of plastic dumped into our oceans ends up
getting inadvertently consumed by marine life, making its way into our
(human) food chain and our meals. Most of the food we source and
consume from our oceans have all ingested plastic in one form or another.
Sewage sludge – a by-product of sewage water treatment – is used in many
countries to fertilize agriculture, and microplastics found in sewer water end
up contaminating this fertilizer, polluting our soil, and once again, appearing
on our dinner plate in yet another form.
HOW MUCH PLASTIC GETS
RECYCLE D?
Estimates show that less than 9% of all plastic produced gets recycled.
These low recycle rates are due to a number of variables – sometimes the
containers are mixed with labeling that is of different material, and because
of the varying chemical compositions of different types of plastic, recycling
these materials together can become very toxic. PET or PETE which is the
clear plastic used for most soda and water bottles is almost 100%
recyclable, the primary issue is the lack of recycling infrastructure. With
current technology, it’s less expensive for companies to produce new plastic
water bottles than it is for them to recycle used bottles. Converting plastic
bottles into carpet and apparel is less energy-intensive and laborious than
converting it back into food-grade drinking bottles. This type of open-loop
recycling process causes degradation of the plastic material, and, over time,
creates products that become non-recyclable because they have degraded
in quality so significantly.

HOW BIG IS T HE WATER BOTTLE

INDUSTRY?
By 2020, the global water bottle market is expected to reach $280 billion,
which means we’ll be spending close to twice the amount of money on
water bottles than we currently spend on green energy. In the United States,
water bottles are the largest beverage category, surpassing soda in the
amount sold each year. It’s a baffling statistic when you consider the
availability of free, safe water in the United States – and the United States
isn’t alone. Globally, we spend over $100 billion every year on bottled water.
To put it in perspective, that’s also the amount we spend every year on
cancer medication. In fact, the sales generated from the plastic water bottle
industry are so substantial that (in theory) one year's revenue from these
corporations could be used to permanently resolve the global water crisis
and they would still have a few billion dollars left to pocket.

Nestlé currently leads the water bottle industry, with over 100 water bottle
manufacturing plants across 34 countries worldwide. In fact, Nestlé
currently pays the US Forest Service for rights to source roughly 30 million
gallons of water per year from California, even during droughts, which means
this water is being allocated to water bottles that are shipped worldwide
before being allocated to local citizens. Coca-Cola, Dalone, and PepsiCo are
the next largest water bottle producers.
HOW ARE PLASTIC WATER BOTTL E S
MADE AND W HAT IS THE CARBON
FOOTPRINT?
Plastic water bottles are generally made of a plastic called polyethylene
terephthalate (PET). If you’ve ever heard of the dangers of BPA, a hazardous
chemical and endocrine disruptor that mimics the hormone estrogen, this is
the source material they are often referring to. According to the corporations
who are bottling the water, they deny that their plastics contain BPA or any
harmful chemicals – while simultaneously they will not disclose what
chemical mixtures they use to produce their plastic bottles. BPA has shown
a host of dangerous side-effects including fertility issues and prostate
cancer. To meet the demand for American consumption, approximately 17
million barrels of oil are required to produce PET alone. If you do the math,
the energy required to produce one plastic water bottle is equivalent to
filling the bottle ¼ of the way with oil.

Unlike tap water which is distributed through energy efficient infrastructure,

producing bottled water involves burning vast quantities of fossil fuels. Raw
materials like petroleum and gas have to be transported to plastic
manufacturers to create the plastic resin, producing carbon emissions and
expanding the water bottles carbon footprint in the process. Once the
plastic is produced, pressurized air is used to stretch the plastic into the
shape of a water bottle. These plastic bottles are usually ‘hot-filled’, this
means when the plastic is blown and it’s piping hot and still off-gassing, it is
filled with “purified water”, which immediately pulls all of the contaminants
into the water. Afterward, the bottles are cooled by being placed near pipes
that have cold water running through them. By the time a bottle of water
makes it to a store near you, it has a total carbon footprint equal to 82
grams (or 3 ounces) of carbon dioxide.

Producing plastic water bottles also exhausts water resources, taking over
three times as much water to produce a bottle of water than the contents of
the container itself. It’s an incredible waste of our clean water supply,
especially considering we are on the brink – if not already – of a global
water shortage, which means that every drop of water used in producing
plastic water bottles is being pulled from local streams and rivers that could
supply local communities. The UN estimates that 1.8 billion people will live
in areas with critical water shortage by 2025.
BUT ARE N’T PLASTIC WATER
BOTT LE S A GRE AT S OLUTION FOR
THE CLE AN WAT ER CRIS IS ?
For developing nations that don’t have clean water infrastructure, plastic
water bottles may seem like a godsend. Even if polluting the oceans was a
worthy tradeoff for offering clean water to these nations, for the most part,
plastic water bottles are not helping these countries address the appropriate
issues.

In rural communities, women and children are often walking miles every day
to collect water for their families, usually from streams and ponds that are
full of pollutants. This limits the time they have to work, earn an income or
receive an education, contributing to a cycle of poverty and illness. Those
who cannot afford to feed their children or provide healthcare, cannot afford
the high costs of bottled water. Meanwhile, developing countries may spend
20%-50% of their budget on waste management alone, leaving them little
money to reinvest for clean water infrastructure. Adding waste from plastic
water bottles is only compounding their problems. Instead of looking to
bottled water manufacturers to solve the world’s water crisis, governments
need to invest in clean water delivery infrastructure in underdeveloped and
rural areas.

So why do people purchase plastic bottled water? Many people prefer the
taste of plastic bottled water to tap water. Blind taste tests, however, show
that people can’t actually tell the difference between the two. The irony of it
is that many water bottle distributors use tap water to fill their bottles, and
the truth is, tap water is better regulated than bottled water in terms of
safety requirements (read this article to learn what's in your local tap water).
So it seems we are letting an industry package and sell us a product that in
most developed nations, we get for free. To make matters worse, these
companies are producing an enormous amount of waste while selling water
that is readily available in the municipal line.

W HAT COUNTRIES ARE THE BIGGE ST

PLAST IC POLLUTERS ?
While the United States and Mexico may consume the most per capita, we
are not the world’s biggest polluter. That award goes to China, though the
US is a close second, followed by Brazil, Indonesia, and Japan. Globally, we
go through one million plastic water bottles per minute. Of that figure, some
countries are consuming significantly more water bottles than others. The
US, for example, goes through 1,500 plastic water bottles every second,
whereas China consumes 2,156 bottles per second. The glaring problem here
is when you consider our respective populations: China is roughly 1.3 billion
people, and the US only 350 million. Per capita, the US is consuming far
more. In Mexico, because of poor-tap water quality, they have become the
world’s largest bottled water consumer per capita, an average of 61 gallons
per person each year.

You’ll notice in the table above that these are all industrialized countries,
many of which offer clean water to their citizens straight from the tap, and
yet these are the countries in which plastic water bottles are imported in
the largest quantities. In fact, people in the United States consume more
bottled water than milk or beer, and more than half of the airports in the UK
don’t provide drinking fountains.

To no surprise, the countries that consume the most bottled water, with the
highest rates of pollution, also have the lowest recycling rates. In fact, the
countries with the highest recycling rates don’t even make it to the table
above. Switzerland leads the way, recycling 52% of all waste – followed by
Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.

W HAT ARE W E DOING ABOUT

PLAST IC POLLUTION?
The damage done by plastic water bottles isn’t going entirely ignored. In
England, for example, free water bottle refill locations are being installed in
local businesses, with the goal of having refill zones in every English town
and city by 2021.

Meanwhile, San Francisco has put itself on the map by becoming the first
American city to ban the sale of plastic water bottles. They’re backed by
the Corporate Accountability’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign which has
been encouraging the use of free sources of water.

A number of organizations are hard at work trying to clean up our oceans.

For example, the non-profit organization 5Gyres asks people to pledge not
to use single-use plastics, and Take 3, based in Australia, challenges people
to leave beaches cleaner than they found them.

Unfortunately, moving away from plastic water bottles has been an ongoing
struggle, taking two steps back, one step forward. For example, over the
past six years, many national parks have banned plastic water bottle sales in
an attempt to reduce pollution, but the Trump administration recently
overturned that ban. The United States, China, and India all rejected a
resolution by the UN to deal with plastic waste in our oceans. And China’s
new ban on importing certain foreign waste means that in the future, the
likelihood of plastic water bottles being recycled will decrease.
W HAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?
It’s clear that we don’t have the luxury of waiting for global policymakers to
step in on our behalf. It’s time for all of us to help move the needle, to take
a stance against pollutants like plastic water bottles and single-use plastics
by taking action ourselves.

The Starfish Story has been circulating the internet for a number of years,
and though the original source is unknown, the impact of the story is worth
sharing. It goes something like this:

A grandfather went to the beach with his grandson. As they walked along
the beach, the grandson would stop every few feet to pick up a starfish
and toss it gently into the water.

The grandfather asks his grandson, “What are you doing?”

The grandson says, “The tide is going out. If I don’t throw these starfish
into the water, they’ll die.”

His grandfather says, “There are miles and miles of beach with starfish
along the path. You can’t possibly make a difference.”
 The grandson throws another starfish into the water and says, “I made a
difference to that one.”

When facing a global crisis, it can be tempting to bury our heads in the sand.
It’s easy to believe that we as individuals cannot possibly make a difference
in positively influencing global issues, but as this starfish fable reminds us,
every step in the right direction makes a difference – in influencing your
family and friends, your community, local businesses – people take notice
and everyone becomes more conscious. Slowly, this spirals into a real
movement with real policy changes – even if it doesn’t feel like an earth-
shattering change at that moment in time, it plays a very critical role. With
that in mind, here’s what you can do to reduce consumption of plastic water
bottles starting today:

1. Stop purchasing plastic water bottles

If we stop demanding plastic water bottles, supply will decrease. For

example, Americans are currently eating 20% less beef than they have in
previous years, which has prevented the equivalent of 185 million metric
tons of greenhouse gases from entering our atmosphere.

Perhaps the United States isn’t ready to issue a nationwide ban on plastic
water bottles, but there’s no reason you can’t ban them from your home. You
could even use the money saved to donate to clean water projects
worldwide. The Water Project is fighting to bring clean water to within ½
mile of all villages, and for just $3 – approximately the cost of 17 bottles of
water – you can do your part to help out.

Though studies have shown that tap water in the United States is actually
better than bottled water, if you are concerned about contaminants in the
municipal line, you should install a reverse osmosis water filter on your
faucet and consider adding a water remineralizer to ensure you are not
drinking sterilized water. For water on the go, purchase a BPA-free
borosilicate glass water bottle for yourself and each member of your family.
These can be reused and they are non-porous and non-leaching, ensuring
that one purchase saves years of waste and provides clean water throughout
the day.

2. Educate your children

Educating the next generation on the dangers of single-use plastics ensures

that they become conscious consumers now and advocates in the future. In
a few short years, our children will be the next lawmakers and policy
advisors – make sure they know the impact of single-use plastics and how it
affects our environment and their health.

3. Fight for plastic water bottle bans

If San Francisco can ban the use of plastic water bottles, other cities can
follow suit. Talk to the officials in your local community, many of whom are
already focused on fighting climate change and increasing environmental
awareness. Letting our elected officials know that this is a cause that we
believe in helps push them to make decisions that benefit our local
communities and the world at large.

Of course, the flip side of communicating with your officials is being sure to
turn up to vote when these policies are written.

4. Participate in local clean-ups and events

The amount of plastic waste that has entered our oceans is staggering. To
combat it, take time to go to your local beach and help clean up the trash
that has migrated there. Not only will you reduce waste in the oceans, but
you’ll also make your local beach a more pleasant place to visit. If you’re not
near a beach, ask your nearest environmental organization how you can help
and volunteer.

It can seem like the global plastic pollution epidemic is another tally in the
long list of crises that we face and that we cannot control. This could not be
further from the truth. You don’t have to be a full-time activist to work
towards a better future. By limiting your own consumption of plastic water
bottles you help drastically reduce your ecological footprint while
simultaneously working towards a more sustainable future.

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You can also follow along on Instagram: @kablo_official

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