Bottled Water - The Eco Cost

I read this article from the Observer whilst on the exercise bike in the gym today - at the same time I was merrily sipping away at one of the plastic cups available ‘on tap’ to gym junkies. It certainly made me think about the environmental costs of our obsession with bottled mineral water and sports drinks

‘Britons still consume 3bn litres of bottled water a year….Most bottled water is siphoned into PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles; of 13bn plastic bottles sold in the UK last year, just 3bn were recycled. As recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum feedstocks. It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) just to manufacture a one-litre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions (10 balloons full of CO2) per empty bottle. Extrapolate this for the developed world (2.4m tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year) and it represents serious oil use for what is essentially a single-use object. To make the 29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world’s biggest consumer of bottled water, requires more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year.’

Time to fill up a sports drink bottle with water from the tap - leave it in the fridge overnight and I am sure it will taste just as good as the water available from the ubquitous water dispensers. is the boom in bottled water sales over? The Grocer magazine reported that sales in the UK in 2007 were well down on the year before and that this was only partly down to the appalling summer weather. Is there a case for government intervention in the market similar to the 5 cents per bottle tax introduced in Chicago?