If you were offered a brand new bottle of water or a glass of water from the tap, which one would you reach for? We’ve talked before about how “enhanced” bottled waters are pretty gimmick-filled and may be more of an issue than a boon. We’ve also touched on the current water crisis as well as some of the current complications with tap water today. Any mention of Flint, Michigan will probably bring the dangers of water contamination and an overall shortage to mind for years to come. What about plain, bottled water?

Bottled water has had a chokehold on the American preference for decades. Many of us grew up believing that bottled water was just cleaner and more heavily filtered than what came out of the tap. Even as we drank from hoses and accidentally swallowed lake water, we knew that just based on the cost alone, there had to be something special about that plastic-encapsulated H20. That’s one reason many of us were up in arms when it came out that Aquafina was literally straight from the tap. So, besides the possibility that they are identical to what comes from your kitchen faucet, what are the other big reasons that bottled water might be a bust?

The most obvious reason is right in the name: Plastic. Plastic waste is one of the biggest contributors to global warming and we, as a global community, need to be doing our utmost to combat such an unnecessary strain. More than 17 million barrels of oil are required to produce enough bottled water to meet America’s current demand. Even though some plastic bottles can technically be recycled, less than 1 in 5 are eligible. Even fewer make it into the recycling process. Most end up in a landfill or the ocean. Millions of tons of plastic bottles are currently floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Island. In addition, plastic often carries several chemical contaminants. Have you ever left a water bottle in your car and wondered if it was still okay to drink? The simple answer is, probably not. The longer answer is that the integrity of the plastic used for most bottles (roughly 93% of them) holds up until about 70 degrees. At that point, you are likely ingesting a significant amount of microplastics and heavy metals as well as an unknown cocktail of chemical contaminants that differs slightly between brands. So again, if you are considering drinking that hot, bottled water from the backseat, maybe just don’t!

Below we’ve included some additional reading resources and next time we will talk a little more about how the production of bottled water is ironically wasting a precious, limited resource: water.

Resources:

The Real Reason You Should Stop Buying Bottled Water

The real cost of bottled water - Sustainability - University of Que ensland

Reasons to Avoid Bottled Water | Sustainability at Harvard

We’ve all seen the pictures of plastic waste floating in our oceans. We know that this has a tremendously detrimental impact on aquatic life. It even damages the structure and landscape of the ocean itself. From human waste bioproducts to industrial runoff to general garbage, we pollute one of this earth’s greatest resources with little to no restraint. The ocean is so large, our garbage can’t really make that much of a difference, right? Wrong. What happens when you throw garbage and excrement in the same place that you get your food, year after year? You get sick. Though the heavy metal and PFAS contamination are both consequences of this process, today we are taking a look at micro- and nanoplastics.

Microplastics range in size from about 0.1 μm to 5 mm particles. Particles with a diameter less than 0.1 μm are considered nanoplastics. When trash accumulates in the ocean, it is broken down by abrasion and friction, wildlife and the combination of wind, sea and sand. Of the 380+ million tons of plastic waste produced every year, less than 10% of it is recycled and at least 10% of it will end up in the ocean. Though some of it will end up washing back up onto land, some of this trash will break down and will contaminate the ecosystem it was introduced into. Fish, mussels, and other aquatic creatures will absorb or eat some of these plastics and this will introduce a wide and varying range of chemical and physical contaminants. Some of these particulates become so small that, to the human eye, it may seem as if they’ve dissolved into the salty brine of the sea.

Now, we get about 60 billion kgs (which is something like 66 million tons) of food from the sea every year. We also use about 270 million metric tons of salt each year and while not all salt comes from the sea, a solid percentage of it does and this all poses an obvious issue. About 90 percent of sea salt has been found to contain some level of nanoplastics and we eat both! It’s very likely we use our microplastic salt on our microplastic-filled seafood! Though the hope is that we will all care about the environment enough to want to cut back on plastic pollution for the sake of reduction itself, the idea that the trash you discard without care may very well make its way back into your diet should give you pause. Recently, nearly 200 countries signed a global plastics treaty to reduce global plastic waste. This is the first global treaty of its kind and it is our hope that this will be a real step in the direction of creating a cleaner, sustainable future. One where at minimum we are no longer eating plastic.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210310132335.htm

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.9b04535/suppl_file/es9b04535_si_001.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46417-z.pdf

https://particleandfibretoxicology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12989-020-00358-y