Why Not to buy Bottled Water

Would you buy something if you knew you could get an unlimited amount of it easily for free? Well, you probably have. Think about bottled water. Annual worldwide bottled water sales are estimated to be around $50 too $100 billion a year. But what’s wrong with bottled water? Well, here are 5 reasons:

1. Making the plastic bottles requires up to 47 million gallons of oil each year. 

2. The bottles travel from where they are bottled to you in a truck, plane, or boat - burning fossil fuels along the way. 

3. Less then 1/2 of the Fiji Islanders have a reliable source of safe drinking water. But a factory there produces millions of water bottles and ships them to the US (a country where water comes freely from the tap.)

4. Only a few of the bottles get recycled. Most of them sit in landfills for thousands of years. Or they sit in parks, beaches, forests, or sidewalks as litter.
5. Bottled water costs more per gallon than gas, as this poster shows:

So, why do people buy it if it's so bad? Most people's answers are that they think tap water is gross. Well actually...tap water is much more regulated by the government than bottled water. And if you'd rather be on the safe side, you can easily buy a filter to make sure your water is clean. Also, another argument is that bottled water is convenient. I must agree, it is convenient to have water readily available. But you can solve that problem too, buy taking about five seconds to put a reusable water bottle or two in your car.

So, if you are looking for one thing to do to help the earth, here's one: Don't Buy Bottled Water!