Bottled Water
- Submitted by: nwcarlson
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- Category: Science
- Date Submitted: 11/07/2010 05:56 PM
- Pages: 5
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Nick Carlson
Eric Leuschner
Comp 102
2 October, 2010
Bottled Water, Healthy Choice or Environmental Disaster?
Bottled water represents many things in today’s society. Fancy bottled water like Perrier water can represent wealth and social status, or bottled water like Fiji water can represent pure drinking water. Bottled water also represents a better alternative to supposedly contaminated, undrinkable tap water. However, according to the Mother Nature Network, bottled water can also represent up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year (web). Every year when people think they are making a healthy choice drinking bottled water instead of tap they are actually increasing the amount of plastic waste in landfills and supporting excessive burning of fossil fuel. The only way to fix this problem would be if everyone were to stop drinking bottled water and start drinking tap water.
Bottled water costs thousands of times more than what tap water costs, and yet sales for it continue to increase. In fact, Filter for Good tells us that in 2009, the United States alone used enough plastic water bottles to stretch around the Earth more than 190 times (web). So how did this come to be, you might ask? How did most Americans go from getting water for almost free from their taps to paying thousands of times more for bottled water? Well it all started when water bottle manufacturers started manufacturing demand.
Manufacturing demand for bottled water was a two step process, and their first step was scaring us off tap water. When bottled water was first coming out most people didn’t even consider buying it when they could get water for almost free right in their kitchens. So manufactures started making us feel insecure without it. They started campaigns claiming that tap water was contaminated, and unfit for drinking, and that the only reasonable alternative to this was to drink bottled water. For the most this was a complete false accusation. In fact, Facts about...
Eric Leuschner
Comp 102
2 October, 2010
Bottled Water, Healthy Choice or Environmental Disaster?
Bottled water represents many things in today’s society. Fancy bottled water like Perrier water can represent wealth and social status, or bottled water like Fiji water can represent pure drinking water. Bottled water also represents a better alternative to supposedly contaminated, undrinkable tap water. However, according to the Mother Nature Network, bottled water can also represent up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year (web). Every year when people think they are making a healthy choice drinking bottled water instead of tap they are actually increasing the amount of plastic waste in landfills and supporting excessive burning of fossil fuel. The only way to fix this problem would be if everyone were to stop drinking bottled water and start drinking tap water.
Bottled water costs thousands of times more than what tap water costs, and yet sales for it continue to increase. In fact, Filter for Good tells us that in 2009, the United States alone used enough plastic water bottles to stretch around the Earth more than 190 times (web). So how did this come to be, you might ask? How did most Americans go from getting water for almost free from their taps to paying thousands of times more for bottled water? Well it all started when water bottle manufacturers started manufacturing demand.
Manufacturing demand for bottled water was a two step process, and their first step was scaring us off tap water. When bottled water was first coming out most people didn’t even consider buying it when they could get water for almost free right in their kitchens. So manufactures started making us feel insecure without it. They started campaigns claiming that tap water was contaminated, and unfit for drinking, and that the only reasonable alternative to this was to drink bottled water. For the most this was a complete false accusation. In fact, Facts about...