Popular science suggests that it takes a plastic water bottle 450 to 1000 years to completely biodegrade. Of course that figure depends on the type of plastic (there are six main types of recyclable plastics as well as several more compostable and non-recyclable varieties), but the message should be pretty clear: it takes a long time. In 2006, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation released an interesting report on the growing prevalence of bottled water in the United States. The report was full of staggering figures and puzzling percentages.
- Bottled water costs roughly $10 a gallon while tap water costs less than one cent per gallon.
- Americans spend nearly $11 billion a year on bottled water.
- Of the over 31 billion bottles of water sold a year, only about 10% are recycled. That means that 27.9 billion plastic bottles end up in landfills and oceans every year.
- Every day, 30 million single-serve non-returnable plastic containers are discarded.
While most of these bottles end up sitting in landfills for a long time (the toxic conditions of a landfill are not well suited for biodegradation), a significant percentage of the bottles end up in rivers and streams through which they are carried to the ocean. Here the bottles deteriorate to bits of plastic that are eaten by fish or collect on the ocean floor.
To make matters worse, water remains a grossly unregulated resource (in most places, if you own land you are entitled to the water in the reservoirs under your property). Bottled water companies exploit this fact, which is completely legal, in order to earn billions selling people their own water.
And for anyone who thinks that bottled water is safer and cleaner, it simply isn’t true. Bottle water companies have created distrust in tap water through years of advertising, the tried and true American way. Almost all industrialized countries have high water quality standards which guarantee that tap water is clean and treated. Bottled water, by contrasted, isn’t regulated. Plus the deterioration of a plastic bottle may be slow, but it begins the moment it is created. Leave a bottle of water in the sun for a couple hours and you will be able to taste some phthalate that leaches into the water.
The solution: buy a metal or hard plastic water bottle, drink tap water, and stop polluting.
