Not only do they require a lot of energy to manufacture, but they pollute the environment as well. Reply. Each step in the life cycle of plastic, from the extraction of oil or natural gas at the well pad, through the many steps that result in the resins that become various types of plastic, consumes water. West Texas is in the midst of a boom in which record amounts of oil and natural gas are extracted using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) techniques, with industrial Texas Gulf hubs like Houston and Corpus Christi producing more PET resin than ever before. 15 offers from $23.46. Plastic water (and soda) bottles do not contain BPA. Water footprints account for water use along entire supply (or production) chains, which can be messy just to map, let alone assess. The plastic used to make water and pop bottles is polyethylene terephthalate or PET, which is also known as No. Vorosmarty goes on to say that global trade can “[outsource] environmental problems to countries with lax regulation[s] that host highly polluting manufacturing or agriculture.” Not only can environmental problems be outsourced from one country to another, but also from one region to another within a country, particularly to places that are more open to resource exploitation or that have accommodating regulatory conditions. FACT #3 : Americans purchase about 50 billion water bottles per year, averaging about 13 bottles per month for every person in the U.S.! 2. Today, the convenience of disposable water bottles means that we can find bottled water almost everywhere we go. The Water Footprint Network says the bottle itself could require 3 liters of water for production. Image Credit: David Silverman/Getty Images News/Getty … If you add in the amount of water needed to drill for the oil to make the petroleum-based plastic or the water to make the paper labels, you’re looking at a much larger “water footprint”. It is catastrophic in every sense of the word. "Packaging makes a significant footprint," he says, adding that three liters of water might be used to make a half-liter bottle. This means that three litres of water is needed to make a water bottle that only holds one litre. On average, the median UK household purchases 480 plastic bottles in one year, but only 270 of those gets recycled. Notorious for being a luxury good with a troubling profile, FIJI Water’s plastic bottle life cycle exposes a predicament for consumers who think they are buying a product that is healthy but in fact, could be quite damaging to the environment. Plastic water bottles contain a sizable amount of Bisphenol A (BPA), a substance that has been classified as an endocrine disruptor, meaning it bears a toxic effect on a human’s ability to reproduce. ; By 2050, there will be more plastic in the oceans than there are fish according to environmental scientists. Drilling for oil to make plastic, Ercin says, uses a substantial amount of groundwater. It takes 22 gallons of water to produce one pound of plastic, and double the amount of water found in a standard 500 mL bottle. Because so much water use and pollution occurs from trade that moves water “virtually” around regions, countries and continents, local water mismanagement can lead to clashes over water resources. The estimated blue water footprint of the “oil to PET” steps was 2.64 gallons of water per pound (10 liters per kilogram). In India, for instance, soft drink giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have bottling operations with a long history of using and polluting residents’ scarce water supplies. The results, released this month, show that for North American companies, it takes 1.39 liters to make one liter of water. “Forgoing bottled water and plastic bags and plastic straws is a basic thing we could all be doing that can dramatically affect how much plastic ends up in the environment,” she says. By 2016, bottled water industry representatives are anticipating bottled water will overtake carbonated soft drinks and become the number one packaged beverage sold in the U.S.1In 1976, annual consumption of bottled water was 1.6 gallons per capita, a mere blip on beverage sales charts. Of that, approximately 6.3 billion MT was wasted, with the majority ending up in landfills and the natural environment, while only 9 percent was recycled. This does not mean the problems can be ignored. 93% of the water bottles had some contamination from plastic particles. That averages out to around $6,180 for five years. Just 1 of our filters replaces up to 1,600 plastic water bottles. As consumer products go, plastic has become ubiquitous, and for good reason: it is an extremely useful material that has made life more convenient and in some cases, safer, but plastic has a huge environmental footprint with high costs to its creation. In other words, the amount of water going into making the bottle could be up to six or seven times what's inside the bottle. The amount of water to make the bottle could be up to six or seven times what's inside the bottle, according to the Water Footprint Network. Just as companies are beginning to calculate their carbon footprint, they also need to analyze their water footprints to find opportunities for conservation. A truck load of plastic drink bottles. FACT #4 A study found that in 2010 — only a single year — 8 million MT of plastic waste was swept off the land into the ocean due to poor waste management practices and another 150 million MT was moving through marine ecosystems. Here in the United States, it is increasingly likely that the resin used to make plastic came from the Texas Gulf region, which often experiences its own water stress. When people in Los Angeles, Paris and Singapore sip on genuine Fijian water imported thousands of miles from the tropical island, they are also consuming the virtual water it took to produce resin from water-stressed China and bottles from Fiji. When you expose plastic bottles to … Fracking has a notoriously large water footprint, and industrial expansion around Corpus Christi now includes two thirsty petrochemical facilities that process the building block components of plastic using fracked oil and gas. In a 2011 study, researchers affiliated with the Water Footprint Network estimated the blue and grey water footprints of PET by analyzing the steps by which raw material becomes PET plastic resin. The final step includes molding these pellets into plastic packaging. Only about 23% of plastic bottles are recycled within the U.S. In the U.S alone, it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to meet the demands. The True Price of Plastic. Kai Olson-Sawyer "You could extrapolate that ad infinitum," he says. It’s no secret that reusable water bottles are better for the environment. (That’s typically the minimum life expectancy of a reusable water bottle.) According to the plastic waste study referenced above, from 2002 to 2014 approximately 3.83 billion MT of PET plastic resin was produced worldwide — this is equivalent to 29,000,000,000,000,000 plastic water bottles. To start planning the development of two desalination plants to meet the.... 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