Occasional member of Team Generator, Rosy Whelan, has sent us a power point presentation prepared by RPArchitecture in New York about the impact of Bottled water on the planet. She notes that it is a favourite bugbear of hers. It is also a favourite bug bear of mine Rosy. I have combined the statistics that you have sent along with the statistics from Giovanni's Guide to Saving the Planet.
In 2004 the people of the world consume 26 billion litres of water in 28 billion drink bottles. That consumes 17 million barrels of oil and of 2.5 billion litres of water, producing 2.5million tonnes of carbon dioxide just to make the bottles. Water bottlers waste up to on third of the water they consume. Consumers spent 100 billion dollars on bottled water.
The total volume of packaged drinks was a staggering 490billion litres. Making bottled drinks consumes about 3.5 litres of water per litre of drink. The bottles for all these packaged drinks consume around 350million barrels of oil and 50 billion litres of water to make and produce more than 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Just in case you thought this was somebody else's problem, each year australians throw away about 100,000 tonnes of drink bottles. That is 50 kilograms of plastic for every human being in Australia. The water used in the manufacturing of those bottles is almost 2 gigalitres, enough to save the Murray Darling. That also represents 2 million barrels of oil.
You can check these statistics under Saving the planet or download Rosy's power point here.
