Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [54]
In San Francisco, which drinks EPA-approved unfiltered water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, Mayor Gavin Newsom announces he’ll no longer spend taxpayer dollars on bottled water—a savings of half a million dollars a year, not counting the cost of hauling the empties away. Mayors of Salt Lake City, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, and Minneapolis soon follow suit. New York City launches a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar ad campaign to promote tap, and Chicago passes a five-cent bottled-water tax, which is expected to raise more than ten million dollars a year for the city and also cut its waste-hauling costs (that is, if the law isn’t overturned by angry retailers and the International Bottled Water Association, which represents 162 bottlers in the United States).
Suddenly bottled water is big news. Every time I open a newspaper, magazine, or Web browser, there’s another story announcing that this harmless indulgence is anything but. On the lookout for this sort of material, I nearly drown in the tidal wave of eco-criticism. With a mounting sense of anticipation—how far will the attacks go, and is the backlash only a fad?—I watch as reporters, using statistics from academics and environmental groups, blast away at the bottled-water industry. But curiously, their focus isn’t water, at first. It’s oil.
Specifically, the seventeen million barrels it takes each year to make water bottles for the U.S. market. (Plastic-making also generates emissions of nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide, and benzene, but because we’re in the thick of the global-warming movement, not the environmental-carcinogen movement, this doesn’t get much play.) That’s enough oil to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year.
Is seventeen million barrels a lot? Yes and no. Total U.S. oil consumption is twenty million barrels a day. But the small puddle that goes into polyethylene terephthalate doesn’t include the energy needed to fill the bottles or to move them to consumers. Every week, a billion bottles snake through the country on tens of thousands of trucks, trains, and ships. (In 2007, Poland Spring alone burned 928,226 gallons of diesel fuel.) And then there’s the energy it takes to chill water in fridges and to haul the empties off to landfills. It adds up.
Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute estimates that the total energy required for every bottle’s production, transport, and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil. His finding, undisputed by the water-bottling industry, shocks me. (And yes, I realize that thicker plastic containers contain even more oil, but your average American doesn’t consume more than twenty gallons of, say, ketchup a year.) Oil, as we know, is a nonrenewable resource, mostly imported. The hunt for more oil is politically dangerous, scarily expensive, and environmentally ruinous.
And then there’s the water itself—increasingly important as we enter what’s been called the post–Peak Water era. Manufacturing and filling plastic water bottles consumes twice as much water as the bottle will ultimately contain, in part because bottle-making machines are cooled by water. Plants that use reverse osmosis to purify tap water lose between three and nine gallons of water—depending on how new the filters are and what they remove—for every filtered gallon that ends up on the shelf. Cleaning a bottling plant also requires a great deal of municipal water, especially if the end product is flavored. On average, only 60 to 70 percent of the water used by bottling plants ends up on supermarket shelves: the rest is waste.
Of course, all these costs—water, energy, oil—aren’t unique to bottled water. It takes forty-eight gallons of water to make a gallon of beer, four gallons of water to