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With the Consequential pollution on This Planet, are We Better off Drinking Tap Water?

Think you’re doing yourself a favor by consuming bottled water? While you may possibly think you are doing your body good, are you recycling that bottle? If not, the environmental impact can be catastrophic. Each one of us can be a factor to cleaning up the pollution in this world by consuming tap water. (Find out how to make tap water not only safe to drink but very good for you too, by clicking on this link: Healthy Drinking Water of Life).

It’s not just the Earth that suffers when you drink 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. Although they might seem harmless enough some scientists are currently saying that if exposed to the heat for extended periods of time that the result can be a leaching of chemicals into the water. These chemicals can lead to a different chemical makeup of the water and thus lead to a change in smell and even taste. What’s worse is the fact 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 known, scientists are working on testing the effects of such long-term exposure to these chemicals. All of a sudden tap water is sounding pretty good huh?

In an even further scary event, experts have warned about a few specific chemicals in general. Antimony is one and is a potentially poisonous material used in making PET. Scientists in Germany have discovered that the more bottled water sits around, the more antimony it produces. This is worrying as there is in fact no telling how long that bottled water you just purchased had been sitting on the shelf at the store or even in the warehouse proir to it hitting the shelf for that matter. High concentrations of antimony can produce 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 other hard plastics, but not PET), may cause neurological and behavioral troubles in fetuses, babies and kids. This is a disturbing discovery, but it doesn’t stop with kids. In a separate study a NIH-sponsored panel established that the danger was even worse than expected. Their findings said that adult exposure to BPA likely affects the brain, the female reproductive system and the immune system. Who said bottled water was good for you?

While the effects to us are a staggering concept, let’s in no way disregard what the ecological impact to our Mother Earth can be too. The pollution created by individuals which do not carry out a healthy recycling routine can be incredibly high.

While we as a world struggle to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, producing bottled water is really increasing it. The bottles themselves are made of a matter that is precisely linked to fossil fuels. In many cases the bottled water that we drink is packaged in other countries that can be thousands of miles away. The distribution alone leads to even more fossil fuels being burned consequently creating more pollution. While the intent with bottled water is good (at least for us), the ecological impact that we are creating is anything except good.

If we took the energy it takes to create all the bottled water in the United States for one year to keep up with demand, we would accumulate ourselves the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil. That is enough to fuel one million cars for a whole year.

There is as well the definite misuse of water that goes on as well and that is not a reference to the water going down the drain while you are running your tap water. It takes about 72 billion gallons of water per year, solely to produce the unfilled bottles which the bottled water ends up in, according to the Institute for Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University. Added waste is seen as it is estimated that it takes two liters of water to create every one-liter of bottled water that are stocked on the store shelves.

But possibly the most alarming fact of all is the level of bottles that are really recycled. Recycling is a fairly simple thing to do, however it is estimated that only about 20 percent of the unfilled bottles get as far as the recycling plants here in the United States. This means that 80 percent of the unfilled bottles are left to produce pollution within our landfills for countless years to come. Take into account, that bottle of water that took you three minutes to drink can take ten thousand years to biodegrade. Now that’s a negative environmental impact!

It’s in no way rocket science. Drinking bottled water is not the harmless bet you may have thought it to be and when it comes to the shape of the Earth it is worse than tap water. With so many people NOT participating in recycling these days, the pollution of the Earth is rising at a pace that can’t be continued for a great deal longer. If it continues, we will be leaving our children and our grandchildren in the midst of one ugly ecological impact to have to deal with.