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Bottled Water and the Environmental Impact that Follows Inadequate Recycling, Production of the Bottles, Transporting of the Bottled Water and more.

By: Peggy Pollice

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With the Environmental Devastation, are We Better off Consuming Tap Water?

Consuming bottled water is not as wonderful for you as you thought. Not only are we discovering that bottled water is not all it is thought to be, but if these bottles aren’t getting recycled the effect on the environment can be disastrous. Each of us can contribute to cleaning up the litter in this world by consuming tap water. (Discover how to make tap water not only safe to consume but enormously healthy for you also, through out this website: www.healthywateroflife.com).

It’s not solely the Earth that suffers when you consume bottled water; often times it can be you. Generally bottled water comes in polyethylene terephthalate bottles, indicated by a number 1, PET or PETE on the underside of the bottle. Some scientists are now stating that a leaching of chemicals into the water can take place if the bottle is exposed to heat for long periods of time (example leaving bottled water in your car). These chemicals can lead to a different chemical makeup of the water and thus lead to a change in smell as well as taste. What’s worse is the truth that you are now ingesting the chemicals that are absorbed by the water and exposing your body to chemical pollution. While the effects of this pollution are not yet identified, scientists are working on testing the effects of such long-term exposure to these chemicals. All of a sudden tap water is sounding not bad huh?

In an even more frightening development, experts have recently warned about a few specific chemicals in general. Antimony, used in making PET, is one of these potentially poisonous materials. Scientists in Germany have established that the longer bottled water sits around, the more antimony it develops. Who knows how long that bottle of water, you are now drinking, was sitting on the store shelf before you purchased it. For that matter, who knows how long it was being stored in a warehouse before it reached the shelf. High concentrations of antimony will cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

In another shocking incident, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) committee agreed that bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical discovered in polycarbonate (used to make water cooler jugs, sport-water bottles and additional hard plastics, but not PET), may cause neurological and behavioral troubles in fetuses, babies and kids. This disturbing discovery doesn’t end with kids. In a separate study a NIH-sponsored panel found that the risk was even worse than projected. Their findings said that adult exposure to BPA likely affects the brain, the female reproductive system and the immune system. I thought bottled water was supposed to be goodfor you?

While the effects to us are a shocking theory, let us not overlook what the environmental impact to our Mother Earth can be as well. The pollution which is created by all those bottles which are not recycled can be devastatingly high.

Making bottled water really increases the world’s dependency on fossil fuels. This is moving backwards in our fight to lessen our dependencies. The bottles themselves are made of a matter that is directly correlated to fossil fuels. The bottled water that we consume could be packaged far away, in many instances in another country that is thousands of miles away. The shipping alone leads to even more fossil fuels being burned therefore creating more pollution. Though the intent with bottled water is good (at least for us), the environmental impact that we are creating is anything other than good.

If we took the energy it takes to make up all the bottled water in the United States for a single year to keep up with demand, we would accumulate ourselves the equal of 17 million barrels of oil. That is sufficient to fuel one million cars for an entire year.

There is in addition the actual waste of water that goes on also and that is in no way a reference to the water going down the drain while you are running your tap water. According to the Institute for Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University, it takes about 72 billion gallons of water per year just to produce the empty bottles that the water ends up in. Additional waste is seen as it is projected that it takes two liters of water to create every one-liter of bottled water that line up on the store shelves.

And perhaps the most troubling fact of all is the level of bottles that are actually recycled. It is projected that only about 20 percent of the unfilled water bottles end up at the recycling plants here in the United States; even though recycling is an easy thing to do. Hence, this leaves about 80 percent of the empty bottles left to create pollution in our landfills for a long time to come. It takes about ten thousand years for an unfilled water bottle to biodegrade, the same bottle of water that just took you three minutes to consume. Can you imagine the damaging environmental impact?

It’s right here in black and white. Bottled water is not the safe bet you may have thought it to be. It all boils down to the wellbeing of our bodies and the health of our planet and bottle water can negatively affect both. With a lot of people NOT participating in recycling these days, the pollution of this Earth is increasing at a pace that can’t be continued for much longer. If it continues, we will be leaving our children and our grandchildren among one ugly environmental impact to have to deal with.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Discover the impact on the wellbeing of our bodies as well as the environmental impact of bottled water. You won’t believe your eyes!

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