It may not come as a big surprise, but scientists have crunched the numbers to find out what the true environmental cost of bottled water is
Tap water is over three-thousands times better for the planet’s environment than bottled water is, according to scientists. In fact, it actually takes three times as much water to produce one plastic bottle as the container can hold.
This might not come as a surprise to most people, but researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) have investigated the figures to work out just how much of an impact it actually has.
The research was focused on Barcelona, Spain, which is a city home to around 1.35 million people, nearly 60% of whom consume bottled water at least some of the time.
They used something called a “life cycle assessment” which estimates the environmental impact of an item over its entire lifespan. That includes the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, use and disposal.
This comes after an 11-year-old activist has committed to walking the 200 mile distance from his home in Yorkshire to London in a bid to help raise awareness of climate change. Jude Walker, who is from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, is doing the challenge in order to drive the support for a petition that would introduce a nationwide carbon tax to the UK.
In the US alone, water bottle manufacturing takes 1.5 million barrels of oil every year – more than it would take to power 100,000 homes. And that is without the fossil fuels or emissions costs of transporting them to shops.
The ISGlobal study found that if every resident in Barcelona switched to bottled water, extracting the raw materials would cost more than €70 million and lead to the loss of 1.43 animal species every year.
This would be 1400 times more of an impact on ecosystems and 3500 times higher cost to the environment for resources, than if the whole city were to drink tap water instead.
The use of bottles of water has risen in recent years in part due to factors such as taste, odour, marketing campaigns, as well as lack of public faith within the quality of tap water.
Cristina Villaneuva, an ISGlobal researcher, says that there have been substantial improvements in tap water quality in Barcelona over the last few years.
“However, this considerable improvement has not been mirrored by an increase in tap water consumption, which suggests that water consumption could be motivated by subjective factors other than quality.”
This comes after a team from NASA and NOAA have recently found that Earth’s “energy imbalance” had doubled between the years of 2005 and 2019. The energy imbalance of heat within the planet is simple to understand but is complex in its causes and impacts upon the climate.
One of the problems with the way water is consumed, is the perceived presence of chemical compounds such as trihalomethanes. In an innovative move, data on the lifecycle of bottled water is also compared to a framework that is being used in order to measure health.
They found that any risk to health was small and adding a domestic filtration system reduces the risk considerably.
“Our results show that considering both the environmental and the health effects, tap water is a better option than bottled water, because bottled water generates a wider range of impacts”, says ISGlobal researcher Cathryn Tonne.
