Team orange: How does bottled water effect the environment?

It should come as no surprise that bottled water equals waste, but how much? Even though there are recycling programs set up across America, only one in every five water bottles is recycled, leaving three billion tons of plastic bottles as waste in landfills (“The Facts About Water”). That is, if the plastic bottles make it into the trashcan. Some end up littering roadsides, sewer systems, and water bodies. Ocean conservationist, Stiv Wilson, estimates there are roughly 315 million pounds of plastic in the ocean (Reilly). Beyond the obvious waste of the plastic bottles is the often overlooked waste: the waste used in making, processing, and distributing bottled water. It takes three times as much water to make bottled water compared to what is actually in the bottle (“The Facts About Bottled Water”). To produce bottled water, it takes enough oil to fuel 1 million cars for an entire year! That’s roughly 17 million barrels of oil used annually (“The Facts About Bottled Water”). In 2006, 18 million gallons of water was shipped from Fiji to California creating 2,500 tons of global warming pollutions. Likewise, on the other side of the US 3,800 tons of global warming pollutants were released transporting water from Western Europe to New York City (“Bottled Water”).