Mineral water or plain water?

 

It’s the most common phrase you hear once the waiter has taken your order at any better than average restaurant in the country or anywhere in the world (Although in the west it would be “Bottled water or tap water, Sir”? And for a plethora of reasons ranging from paranoid health consciousness to not sounding cheap around your girl, you’re most probably going to end up saying “Mineral Water, please”, although you know that the restaurant’s tap water is also good purified water.  And each time you do so, you become an unwitting accomplice to an environmental disaster thinking it’s just one small piece of plastic. Don’t believe me?, Let me run you through the most likely
life cycle of this one small piece of plastic.

Plastic is basically a petroleumproduct, needless to say how environmentally damaging the oil extraction industry is. Oil’s deemed to be extracted for fuel purposes, only more drilling and processing is done to extract this particular component from the crude. Once this Polyethylene Teraphtalate is extracted it’s stored in the form of small pellets or miniature bricks (if I may) and shipped to various bottling companies where each pellet of plastic is heated and blown to acquire its
shape. It’s then filled with the beverage/water and shipped to distributors, then dealers and then retailers onto the supermarket shelves.

What happens next is the Devil........

Retailers sell these water bottles to consumers as well as businesses like restaurants and hotels. Once consumed, the empty bottle is as good as a purpose built pollution causing device. You’d be convinced in a restaurant that the bottle is safely disposed after use. Or when you use a plastic bottle on the road you make sure you throw it in a trash bin and feel like you’re being very considerate about the environment. But, little did you know that this plastic that you dump is going along with the rest of the trash straight into a landfill and is going to rot there for as long as 700 years. Or worse, it is dumped into the ocean where it travels all the way into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that stretches all the way from Hawaii to Japan, making all aquatic life deteriorate and die under this stretch. Same is the case with the restaurant that carefully disposes the plastic in a trash bin and is then taken into a landfill by the garbage disposal guys. 

Here are some quick global stats about water bottles:

1.       Every hour 250,000 plastic bottles are dumped (not recycled).

2.       Every year, over 1,000,000 tons of plastic reaches the Pacific Ocean alone.

3.       Every year 1,000,000 aquatic animals die due to the plastic dumped in the oceans.

4.       Only 10% of the bottles are recycled. The rest go into landfills or oceans.

Source: Container Recycling Institute (USA)

Here’s the point I’ve been trying to make: As long as your used plastic bottle is not put into a recycle bin that’s managed regularly by a recycling company, it’s as good as throwing it in the middle of the road (you wouldn’t do that, would you?) Another alternative is to reuse your plastic bottles at home for storing water in the refrigerator. However, the best option remains complete avoidance of bottled water.

It’s too hard to totally avoid plastic; however, once you’ve purchased it you have total control over its fate. It can become a cute little thing in your fridge or it could be out there in the pacific undergoing photo-degradation, disintegrating into fine polymer particles, being consumed by unwitting aquatic animals (which you might consume one day if you’re into seafood). You decide the bottle’s fate: Refill or Landfill

And the next time you go on a date to that classy upscale restaurant, you know what to say to the waiter.