“Pop Culture in a Bottle” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 253

liters of water, requiring some nine hundred thousand tons of plastic to bottle. Another
study showed that 50 billion plastic water bottles were used in the United States that
year, or 167 bottles for every citizen. To make a typical one-liter plastic bottle, cap, and
packaging, according to the European plastics industry, requires about 3.4 megajoules
of energy . In 2006, it took 106 billion megajoules of energy to make enough bottles to
contain the 31.2 billion liters of water Americans drank.
In a widely cited editorial in 2007, “ In Praise of Tap Water ,” the NewYorkTimesre-
ported that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles Americans
used. But that number was incorrect, it turned out, the result of a misunderstanding
between a journalist and a researcher. After conducting a thorough study, Peter Gleick's
Pacific Institute found that it took far more oil— about 17 million barrels of oil equival-
ent—to produce the plastic water bottles used by Americans in 2006. That, the institute
reported, was the equivalent of enough energy to fuel more than 1 million American
cars and light trucks for a year. By contrast, the energy required for local tap water is
typically about 0.005 megajoules per liter, or around a thousandth as much. A further
benefit of tap water is that it does not produce tons of plastic litter or require enormous
transportation costs.
Indeed, every ton of PET manufactured results in about three tons of carbon dioxide.
The production of plastic bottles for water in 2006 resulted in more than 2.5 million
tons of CO 2 , a greenhouse gas.
Filling the bottles of water at bottling plants, transporting it by flatbed truck, rail,
freighter, or cargo plane, used more energy. So did chilling it in store coolers and home
refrigerators. The Pacific Institute concluded that the total amount of energy used for a
bottle of water could be represented by filling a plastic water bottle a quarter full of oil.
Because producing energy requires water, the institute concluded, every liter of bottled
water sold required three to four liters of water to produce.
PET is recyclable, but the great majority of water bottles—about 38 billion a year,
worth over $1 billion in 2008, by one estimation—end up in landfills. This is a terrible
waste, but it is not an easy problem to fix.
In the United States, many different grades of plastic are used for beverage bottles,
but in spite of well-meaning education programs, the public has yet to embrace recyc-
ling in a serious way. No national network of recycling plants that will accept a wide
range of plastics exists; financial incentives for consumers to recycle are poor; and there
are no national guidelines for recycling. The problem requires federal leadership to
solve.
It took Western European nations years to work out recycling strategies, but many
countries there now have relatively effective systems in place. In France, Italy, and Ger-
many, governments and industry have partnered to educate the public: large multi-