Plastic water bottles are specifically designed for single-use and therefore, reusing plastic water bottles has been shown to encourage bacteria growth and chemical leaching. Bottled water is laced with harmful chemicals such as phthalates which have been linked to an increased risk of cancer. Additionally, plastic bottles contain BPA which has been linked to various reproductive issues. Plastic water bottles can be made from several classifications of plastics, but are most commonly engineered from polyethylene terephthalate PET due to the strong yet lightweight nature of the compound.
Assuming the daily consumption of 64 oz of water for the average drinker, the annual use of one reusable water bottle would therefore save approximately 1, plastic bottles per year. This would lead to a sizable impact on the environment. We need to clean up our oceans. We need to significantly reduce our dependence on single-use plastic products to curb the growing epidemic. There is.
To make your shopping. A new study from the EWG has been released, and the results are harrowing. Nearly three fourths of Americans drink tap water at least.
When submerged in water, GOpure Pod prevents bacteria and viruses from entering your drinking water container by de-activating them on contact, charcoal filters DO NOT. It May Not Even be Filtered While bottled water is often depicted as being higher quality than tap water, the fact is that in many instances bottled water is glorified tap water.
Bottled Water Often Contains Toxins From The Plastic The primary risk associated with drinking bottled water is the fact that you can be exposed to harmful toxins from the plastic. Drinking Bottled Water Can Cause Development and Fertility Issues While more manufacturers are choosing to sell BPA-free plastic water bottles, it is still a common component found in water bottles made from Type 7 plastic.
It Also Correlates to Higher Rates of Disease in Adults Exposure to the toxins in plastic water bottles has also been linked to higher rates of disease as adults. You Might be Drinking Microplastics Perhaps the most concerning thing about bottled water that has come to light in recent years is that drinking bottled water can put people at risk of consuming microplastics.
Reusing Water Bottles Also Poses a Danger In an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, some people have started reusing disposable plastic water bottles by refilling them multiple times.
Frequently Asked Questions What are plastic water bottles made of? Why are plastic water bottles bad for the environment? What chemicals are in plastic water bottles? How many plastic water bottles are used per day? Why is it bad to refill plastic water bottles? Why is bottled water bad for you? What type of plastic are water bottles made of? How much plastic is saved by using reusable water bottles? January 29, You might also like. Fill 1 3x Created with Sketch.
Close Menu. Drinking Water Health and Wellness Shower Filters Water Water Contamination Water Filters Water in the News Water Softeners Water Testing Well Water 1. As bottling and distribution grew cheaper, more Americans turned to bottled water as an alternative to the questionable output from early urban water systems.
The late 19th century saw the creation of a flurry of spring water companies; some of the brands, like Arrowhead and Ozarka, are still on the market today. But by the early 20th century, the chlorination of municipal water supplies made safe drinking water widely available, and the sale of bottled water declined into a specialty trade.
In the s, just million gallons of bottled water were being sold in the United States—about a gallon and a half per person per year. Much of that came in the big five-gallon jugs used in office water coolers; the rest made up a niche market of mineral waters bottled from natural springs.
But then one of the niche players decided to get serious. Perrier, a French brand of sparkling natural spring water that was founded in the mids, had been languishing for decades, its distinctive green bottles selling in a few high-end restaurants and almost nowhere else.
In , the firm hired Bruce Nevins, a year-old ex—Special Forces officer and former Levi Strauss executive, to relaunch the brand to the American market with a blitz of television ads voiced by Orson Welles. By highlighting its French pedigree and premium price, Perrier played off baby boomers' growing desire for status as the generation shed its tie-dyed T-shirts and started entering the corporate world.
Health concerns played an important role, too: Amid a wave of media coverage of studies linking saccharin—the artificial sweetener used in many diet sodas—with cancer, Nevins positioned "pure Perrier" as a healthful alternative to soft drinks. His timing couldn't have been better. Jogging was in; the Martini was out. Farrah Fawcett even used it to rinse her hair, the article declared. Perrier's American sales rocketed from 3 million bottles in to some million just four years later.
That opened the door for competing sparkling-water brands to flood the market. Bottled water's cachet only continued to grow alongside Americans' increasing commitment to exercise and healthful diets.
Health clubs and upscale stores in New York and Los Angeles introduced water bars, displaying bottles from around Europe and from even more distant locales like Fiji, charging, as Corby Kummer put it in a New York Times piece, "laughable prices for something that can be gotten out of a faucet.
The International Bottled Water Association's voluntary code of standards dictates that advertisements "should not exploit consumer fears about the safety of public drinking water supplies. Health officials pushed back, pointing to Perrier's benzene contamination incident as evidence that the bottled-water industry was hardly immune to contamination issues, and publicly fretting that dental hygiene might suffer as more people shifted to drinking non-fluoridated bottled water.
By , municipal officials in cities like Houston and Kansas City were announcing plans to get into the bottled-water business themselves, with proposals to bottle and sell the output of their municipal water supplies.
Dan Jones, the deputy director of the Houston public works department, told the New York Times , "Municipal water professionals have always laughed at people paying ridiculous amounts of money for water that they know is not better than the water they get out of their tap. We just note that for whatever reason, people seem to like to get their water out of bottles these days. In the end, though, it wasn't American cities that cashed in but the giant soft drink companies, who, after years of dragging their feet, finally decided to get into the game.
A tectonic shift was under way in the beverage industry, and it involved much more than water. Americans were looking for alternatives to carbonated soft drinks, and water was just one of many options—including bottled teas and lemonades, like Snapple and AriZona Iced Tea; sports drinks, like Gatorade and Powerade; and even coffee-based drinks—that surged in the market as the 21st century neared.
Pepsi was the first to embrace the new order. Pepsi began test-marketing Aquafina, its brand of filtered bottled water, in late , and a few years later rolled it out nationwide with a huge marketing campaign. Coke resisted following at first, preferring to promote consumption of its soft drinks over an alternative that might cannibalize sales. In February , The Coca-Cola Company gave in to the inevitable and introduced its first bottled-water brand.
The name was Dasani, which, as a Coke spokesperson explained, had no specific meaning but was intended to convey "a clean, fresh taste.
As Coca-Cola and Pepsi moved into the market, the reactions from industry watchers were decidedly mixed. The s witnessed vigorous debates—sometimes lighthearted, sometimes in earnest—over whether bottled water was of any real value to consumers, or little more than a slick swindle. Beverage companies routinely used terms like ''mountain fresh'' and images of glaciers and snowcapped peaks to promote water that had never come within a hundred miles of a mountain, much less the Arctic.
Ozarka, an old brand that had surged back on the market in the post-Perrier years, was no longer bottled in the Ozarks but rather came from springs in east Texas. In the wake of the Aquafina and Dasani launches, a flurry of news stories emphasized the fact that, far from tapping mineral-rich mountain springs, the soda giants were merely pumping and filtering water from local municipal sources.
Many commentators found such details highly amusing, and portrayed the bottled-water business as something akin to selling ice to Eskimos—gulling consumers into paying a dollar or more for something they could essentially get for free. In , the New York Times interviewed a gaggle of Madison Avenue ad execs for a tongue-in-cheek piece on how one might package and sell water from less-than-exotic sources, like the Hudson River.
Others didn't see much humor in the subject. In , Corporate Accountability International CAI , a corporate watchdog organization, launched a campaign called "Think Outside the Bottle" and staged blind taste tests of both tap and bottled water to prove that consumers couldn't tell the difference.
In the group's view, bottled water is a prime example of "manufactured demand": Bottled-water companies, CAI argues, first scared consumers about the safety of tap water, then seduced them with images of pure mountain streams as a carefully calculated strategy to sell them an "unnecessary product.
More and more advocates also began to decry the environmental impact of bottled water, citing the oil and energy used to manufacture the bottles as well as the billions of bottles that ended up in landfills or trash incinerators each year.
And yet, bottled-water sales continued to climb, topping 8 billion gallons for the first time in and, after a slight dip during the Great Recession, surging to over 10 billion gallons in Paying money for a bottle containing nothing more than plain drinking water, once dismissed as an absurd expenditure, had become normalized in the American market.
The big soda companies were the apparent victors, opening a spigot of seemingly endless profits from a product whose raw materials could essentially be had for free.
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