During the last couple of decades, many people started using plastic water bottles to drink water. It is an easy way to drink water wherever and whenever, but most people don't know about is the negative effects it has on the environment.
There are a lot of disadvantages to plastic water bottles. For example, in making plastic bottles itself, companies use a product called polyethylene terephthalate(PET), which requires an enormous amount of fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not just used for making the bottles, transportation and processing the water also uses energy from fossil fuels too. Recent studies showed that it takes 17 million barrels of oil a year to manufacture water bottles. As you might already know, fossil fuels produce a great amount of carbon dioxide, which increases greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are a major factor in global warming and climate change.
Another issue is that it’s impossible to produce bottled water manually, so there are technologies that manufacture them, which results in wasting water. Every time someone drinks bottled water, they are wasting 3 times the amount of water they just drank.
Recently plastic pollution has been a big problem. Only 12% of all the plastic bottles were recycled and the rest of them ended up in either landfill or the ocean. For instance, last year 22 billion plastic bottles were in the landfills and 8 million metric tons of plastic were in the ocean. It would take about 1000 years for a plastic bottle to decompose, and in the meantime, plastic pollutes its surrounding environment. Due to plastic pollution, 100 thousand marine animals are killed each year.
There is also another reason why you should not waste your money on plastic bottled waters. Many people believe that water from plastic bottles is better or tastes better, meanwhile half of the water in plastic bottles comes from the tap. Companies use the words “spring” and “natural” on their tags to fool the clients into buying their products.
To conclude, plastic water bottles are affecting our environment by using fossil fuels for production and transportation, and by causing a great amount of pollution after it’s used. You can help reduce pollution and save the environment by using reusable water bottles from now to drink water. If you are willing to take more actions, talk about this issue with your community, and come up with possible solutions :)