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Bottled water’s sickening side effects: 86% of those single serve bottles are not recycled

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 4, 2008 at 5:50 am

From Fox News:

Demand for bottled water is quite healthy. Consumers purchased nine trillion gallons of it last year in the U.S., according to the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), an environmental think tank. But it turns out there may be some sickening side effects. “There are a lot of negative feelings about bottled water now,” says Dr. Alex Mayer, a professor at Michigan Technological University and the director of the Michigan Tech Center for Water and Society, based in Houghton, Mich.

It costs a lot of money and energy to transport and store plastic water bottles, both of the single-use and water-cooler variety — even more so when you factor in how double-parked delivery trucks snarl traffic in cities and suburbs. “It’s mind-boggling how much gas and oil it takes to make single-serve plastic bottles,” says John Van Newenhizen, director of commercial product development at water-supplier Culligan International Corp., based in Rosemont, Ill. “It’s also mind-boggling how the bottles stay in a landfill.”

Many of the single-use water and soda bottles, made from polyethylene terephthalate or PETE, get recycled and end up in China being re-used to make clothing, carpets, PolarFleece and straps. “The Chinese are the biggest users of recycled plastic bottles,” says Peter H. Gleick, president of the Oakland, Calif.-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, author of “The World’s Water” and a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship for his work on water issues. “No one else comes close.”

Still, about 86 percent of water bottles in the U.S. are not recycled, according to the Washington, D.C.-based EPI. Thirty-eight billion bottles are plowed into landfills every year, according to Lindsay McKinley, a spokeswoman for PUR Water Filtration System, owned by the home products giant Procter & Gamble.