Resource Library/Food/Bottled Water
From Green Needham
The following information was provided by Russ Cohen of the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game Riverways Program after he saw the Boston Globe article announcing the 10% Challenge:
I just read about Needham’s efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the Town and its citizens. I applaud you for this effort and wanted to make a suggestion for an action the Town and its townspeople could take to reduce your collective carbon footprint: minimize the purchase of bottled water and drink tap water instead.
- As you may know, on a per gallon basis, the energy used to manufacture + distribute bottled water containers (whether single-serving or the 5-gallon “water cooler” type) greatly exceed the energy used to deliver drinking water to the tap.
- Furthermore, although it’s not a carbon issue, in these lean economic times, it’s certainly worth pointing out that the economic difference (in terms of cost to the consumer) between tap and bottled is very pronounced, with bottled water typically costing up to hundreds of times more per ounce than tap water.
You may have already seen this info (gleaned from previous editions of our Riverways NewsNotes electronic newsletter) via other means, but just in case you haven’t:
- Bottled Water & Energy - Getting to 17 million barrels of oil
- Would You Pay 1000 Times More For Gasoline If It Came In A Bottle?
- Readers Digest - Six-part article from February 2008
- Elizabeth Royte’s latest book, Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It, is an incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water.
- Bottled Water Backlash from E - The Environmental Magazine
- List of alternatives to purchasing bottled water compiled by the Center for a New American Dream
- Take Back the Tap: Why Choosing Tap Water over Bottled Water is Better for Your Health, Your Pocketbook, and the Environment, a new report from the organization Food and Water Watch, educates consumers about the environmental and economic downsides to bottled water and why they should switch to tap water. It also illustrates the importance of supporting local water utilities through increased federal funding.
- See also Corporate Accountability International‘s efforts to encourage people to Think Outside the Bottle
If you’re already planning to reduce bottled water consumption in municipal buildings, schools, businesses in households in Needham, that’s great, and perhaps the info I’ve supplied will help underscore the validity of that action. Thanks in any case for the opportunity to share this info with you.
Calculating the Carbon in Water Bottles
As a follow-up to Russ's note, we asked whether anyone had a way of calcuating the carbon reduction you might get from reducing bottled water use. There's no simple formula we can find, but here's a suggestion from [email:dlapidus@stopcorporateabuse.org Deborah Lapidus] of Corporate Accountability International in Boston:
You can try using the cost/carbon calculator on the Center for a New American Dream’s website. You plug in the amount of bottled water (in 16 oz bottles) that one would consume in a year, and using a formula it churns out some data, including the amount of CO2 created to manufacture the bottles. We don’t know if this includes CO2 generated for distribution (and I’m not clear on the unit of measurement) but it could get you started. You could make some assumptions – say a family of three drinking two 16 oz bottles of water every day all year would be about 2,190 bottles, and go from there.
