If You Are Drinking Bottled Water As A Healthy Alternative to Tap Water, Think Again
Market: Healthcare
Only 1 in 6 water bottles are being recycled. Plastic water bottles are costing us a fortune, wasting our fossil fuels, polluting our planet and killing our wildlife. So is it worth it? Do the health benefits of drinking bottled water outweigh the negatives?
The bottled water drinking “craze” started in the 80’s with a brand of water called “Evian.” When we started getting into healthy eating and exercise, we started drinking more bottled water. After all, it is healthier for you right? According to the IBWA (International Bottled Water Association), 71% of bottled water drinkers drink bottled water because they believe that bottled water is healthier to drink than regular tap water, but this is just not true. Compared to drinking high-sugar, high-calorie products, bottled water is the healthier option, but what about tap water? How does bottled water compared to drinking water from your tap? It is proven that bottled water is not a healthier alternative to drinking tap water. Both bottled water and tap water come from the same sources. Bottled water is not regulated like tap water is, and most bottled water is filtered tap water anyway.
At Screenflex, we take recycling seriously. 76% of our room divider product is made from recycled materials. This infographic describes the significance of recycling.
Recycling Plastic Water Bottles Infographic by Screenflex Room Dividers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Feel free share this information with others. Here’s a link to the graphic.
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Reasons Why Recycling is Necessary
Cost
Drinking bottled water costs more than 1000 times more per ounce than tap water. Most municipal water costs less than 1 cent per gallon. If you buy a bottle of water from a vending machine for $1.00, your bottled water just cost you around $.05 an ounce. Now consider gasoline at $4.00 per gallon. There are 128 ounces in a gallon, which equates to $.03 for one ounce of gas. Bottled water puts big oil companies to shame regarding profits.
Wasting our Fossil Fuels
Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world. 29 billion water bottles a year are manufactured, which uses 17 million barrels of crude oil to make the bottles. That much oil can keep one million cars going for a whole year.
Polluting our Planet and Killing our Wild Life
A study in 1975 showed that 8 million pounds of plastic were dumped annually in the ocean. Over time, plastics are broken down into smaller pieces and fish, and other animals and birds eat the plastic. Birds, fish and other animals think they are eating food but in reality are eating plastic and die of starvation, toxins or choking. Chemicals like DDT & PCB’s are also absorbed, and some of the sea creatures then end up on our plates, and we ingest the toxins. This is one of many reasons that recycling is so important.
Important Facts Regarding Plastic Waste
- Americans use 2,500,000 plastic beverage bottles every hour!
- Plastic bags and other plastic garbage is thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
- Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
- Recycling 1 ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Six hours of energy is conserved from recycling a single plastic bottle can light a 60-watt light bulb.
- A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That’s a lot of containers — make sure they’re recycled!
At Screenflex, we take recycling seriously. 76% of our room divider product is made from recycled materials. This infographic describes the significance of recycling.
