Bottled Water

Water, water everywhere...

I always gasp at how many bottled water bottles are tossed into the garbage each day. I often have European customers and I find the excess a little frightening. But of course I realize that some municipal water supplies in the US are far from what would be considered palatable. Chlorine is certainly not the next big table garnish. But we have a one-up on places like Bhopal, India or Chernobyl, where no amount of chlorine will do the trick, really.

I was listening to NPR the other day and on the Talk of The Nation (*to my best recollection) program they stated that 16,000,000 water bottles are thrown out every day and only about 15% of these are recycled (probably in Maine where they have a 5 cent deposit). Still, that seems like a waste of easily collected, fairly pure (it contained water, no cleaning required!) PET (That's polyethylene) stores for re manufacture.

So I did become curious about how this profitable thing called water is bottled, transported, sold, consumed (well, that part I have figured out) and discarded.

These sites about bottled water caught my attention...

http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/chap1.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottled_water#Consumption_by_Country

http://www.bottledwater.org/

http://www.container-recycling.org/mediafold/newsarticles/plastic/2006/5-WMW-DownDrain.htm