Billions of bottles were sold on the promise that bottled water is good for hair and skin, healthier than soft drinks and safer than tap water. What sets bottles apart from other plastic products born in the post-World War II rise of consumerism is the sheer speed with which the beverage bottle, now ubiquitous around the world, has shifted from convenience to curse. The transition played out in a single generation.
By , the year sales of bottled water in the United States officially surpassed soft drinks, the world had awakened to the burgeoning crisis of plastic waste. The backlash against the glut of discarded bottles clogging waterways, polluting the oceans and littering the interior has been swift. Suddenly, carrying plastic bottles of water around is uncool. What is cool is wearing them: Hip fashion translates into designer clothes made of recycled water bottles. Activists are zeroing in on the bottle as next in line for banning , after plastic shopping bags.
The tiny towns of Concord, Massachusetts and Bundanoon, Australia already have banned bottles, as have numerous public parks, museums, universities, and zoos in Europe and the United States. The developing world—where 2. In June, Kenya announced a ban on single-use plastics at beaches and in national parks, forests, and conservation areas, effective in June , and the South Delhi Municipal Corporation banned disposable water bottles in all city offices.
Consumers have been drinking bottled beverages for more than a century, first in glass bottles, then in steel and, later, aluminum cans. Early plastic bottles showed promise as a lightweight alternative, but they leached chemicals and failed to contain carbonated drinks. Polyethylene terephthalate has been around since Du Pont chemists developed it while experimenting with polymers to make textiles.
It was lightweight, safe, cheap—and recyclable. In other words, it was the perfect container to set the stage for the bottle binge that followed. Perrier and Evian crossed the Atlantic at around that time, launching the bottled water craze. PepsiCo finally joined the water business and introduced Aquafina in Coke followed with Dansani in Both brands use refiltered tap water. Between and , water sales in the United States had grown by percent, according to Beverage Marketing Corp.
Between and , the average person bought between and packaged drinks ever year, Elizabeth Royte reported in her book Bottlemania, citing data from the Container Recycling Institute. Most of those purchases, she added, involved refillable bottles.
Today, plastic bottles and jars represent about 75 percent of all plastic containers, by weight, in the United States, according to the Plastics Industry Association.
Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University, cautions that to focus entirely on the numbers and overuse of plastic bottles is to miss the essence of the problem. The issue is recovery of the product and incentives to recycle, and the commitment on the part of regulators, as well as brand owners, to only use bottles that contain at least 50 percent recycled plastic. Or 60 percent. They are not making that commitment. Just in London, efforts to reduce plastic bottles abound.
Mayor Sadiq Khan announced plans to build new fountains for refillable bottles. Last spring, runners in the London Marathon were handed edible seaweed pouches at mile 23 containing a sports drink to slake their thirst.
Once bottles have become trash, entrepreneurs around the world are turning them into printer ink cartridges, fence posts, roofing tiles, carpets, flooring, and boats, to name only a few items. Even houses have been constructed from bottles. The latest is a three-story modern on the banks of the Meteghan River in Nova Scotia, promoted as able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.
It only took , bottles. Dasani is filtered tap water. Bottled water can cost as much as 10, times more than tap water, according to the AWWA. The Earth Policy Institute estimates that making bottles to meet the US demand for bottled water requires more than 1.
Transport and disposal of the bottles adds to the resources used, and water extraction — which is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located — adds to the strains bottled water puts on our ecosystem. Of the million pounds million kg that were converted to clean flake:. The paucity of closed-loop recycling means that new water bottles must be manufactured almost entirely from virgin petroleum resin, consuming vast amounts of energy and resources.
Increasing the quantity of bottles containing recycled content would greatly reduce energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. Other bottled water producers are silent on the issue.
Although both Coca-Cola and Pepsi met their recycled content goals in , plastics recycling experts doubt they will reach them in due to the lack of supply of collected scrap bottles.
The growing national consumption of single-serving water bottles made from raw materials is an unnecessary waste of resources, as dozens of recycling businesses have the capacityto recycle these and other PET bottles. They have an economic interest in recycling.
Scrap bottles provide a costsaving alternative to virgin resin both for processors and end-users, who manufacture new bottles and other plastic products. Why are scrap PET bottles in short supply? Why, when Americans are throwing away 22 billion plastic water bottles a year, are there not enough scrap bottles for plastics recyclers?
Exports aside, there were more than million pounds million kg of domestic scrap PET bottles that could have been recycled, but were not. The broken link between postconsumer PET bottles and plastics processors is the lack of an adequate collection infrastructure.
First, nearly one-half of the US population does not have access tokerbside recycling and probably never will. These include individuals and families who live in very rural areas or in high-rise apartment buildings. But even if every family in America had access to kerbside recycling, water bottles are much more likely to be consumed in hotels, offices, schools, and during sporting events and outdoor activities than most beverages, and would not likely make it into the kerbside recycling bin.
Recycling in commercial buildings is scarce, and recycling at sports, entertainment venues, parks and beach areas has proven extremely challenging.
Consumers need to appreciate the fact that their municipal water is not only safe to drink, but it may even be safer than bottled water. They also need to appreciate the multiplicity of environmental problems created by their consumption of bottled water.
Two patches are connected to create one large vortex comprised of 1. Along with large items of plastic being ingested and entangling wildlife, the plastic debris in the patch blocks plankton and algae from receiving any sunlight.
Plankton and algae produce nutrients for other creatures from carbon and sunlight if their existence is threatened the entire food web may change. Over 1 million seabirds and , marine mammals are killed by ocean plastic every year. How many animals die from ocean plastic pollution? While the true figure may not be known, we can estimate over , marine mammals and over 1 million seabirds are killed by ocean plastic every year.
With so many animals mistaking plastic items and particles for food, or becoming entangled, the impact of plastic waste on marine life has become a global crisis. Animals consuming plastic can starve to death as the plastic fills their stomach preventing them from eating proper food, rupturing their organs or blocking food from traveling to the intestine.
In one case in the Philippines a curvier beaker whale was found vomiting blood with over 88 pounds of plastic in its belly. Its body started to destroy itself from the inside due to the plastic waste. Plastic pollution facts show it is ridding the world of m arine species, with over on the edge of extinction, including Hawaiian monk seals and loggerhead sea turtles.
Along with larger mammals even the tiniest organisms can be impacted by toxic microplastics which in turn make their way up the food chain. Your typical clothes wash will produce around , microplastic fibers. The US discards 2 billion razors and 1 billion plastic toothbrushes a year. There are numerous reasons for ocean pollution, including toxic chemicals, nuclear waste and oil spillages, but plastic waste is high on that list.
Sewer overflows, beach visitors leaving rubbish, insufficient waste management, construction, and illegal dumping all contribute to the vast sum of plastics entering our oceans. More than 1 million plastic bag s end up in the trash every minute. If you linked them end to end they would circle the globe 4, times.
Less than 1 in 7 plastic bags are recycled. The US is responsible for around billion bags that end up in the seas. A plastic bag is used on average for 15 minutes. It can take anything between years for a plastic bag to break up. How many plastic bags are in our oceans? Plastic bags are one of the most controversial forms of plastic pollution today. We use them for only minutes on average and bin over 1 million of them every minute.
The US is responsible for around billion bags ending up in the sea every year. Single use plastic is responsible for killing over , marine animals a year. Plastic bags contribute to these deaths by entangling wildlife and being mistaken for food by larger animals such as whales and turtles.
They take between years to degrade, and each bag can kill numerous animals as it makes its way around our oceans for years and years to come. At least 4. Scientists estimate 7. The heart-breaking video of the sea turtle with a straw stuck in his nose went viral and helped launch the anti-plastic-straw movement.
Recent estimates suggest there are plastic bottles every mile of the UK coastline. Americans use an estimated 50 billion plastic water bottles a year. A plastic bottle can last for years in the marine environment. More than billion plastic bottles were sold in across the world, up from around billion a decade ago. Less than half of the bottles bought in were recycled.
Many plastic bottles used around the world are for drinking water, with China being the most responsible for the surge in demand over recent years.
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