iheartsf's Journal: bottled water, oil, environment

Wednesday's New York Times editorial "In Praise of Tap Water" has been one Times' top forwards this week (2 days after release it's still hovering at #4). The paper encourages readers to question their bottled water consumption, given its cost and environmental impact and the fact that bottled water is nearly identical in quality to tap water (if not simply tap water, refiltered). They offer the compelling statistic that the energy that it takes to make the 52 billion bottles we consume annually could power 100,000 cars for a year.

The Pacific Institute took a look at that number, and determined that the Times' source underestimated the impact of bottling water by at least a factor of ten. When it crunched the numbers, it found that producing the water bottles Americans go through every year required more than 17 million barrels of oil, enough to power more than 1,000,000 cars for a year. And that doesn't include the energy used for transporting the water. You can find the Institute's analysis here.