What’s Tappening??

Find out everything you never wanted to know about tap and bottled water from the folks at Tappening.com. It will remind you of how precious a commodity potable water is and how we take water for granted in the free world. Some political experts predict that future conflicts will be fought over this depleting natural resource. On a brighter note, Hyflux, the water treatment company, has a created a revolutionary system called the Dragonfly which extracts water from air to form purified water. We will be reviewing the product in an upcoming article.

We also love Tappening’s “Drinking Problem” series of ads. Very clever.

green team

www.tappening.com

Why Not Bottled Water?

• Bottled water uses energy and resources to create packaging for something that runs cheaply and cleanly from the faucet in your own home
• Not only is it expensive and energy demanding to make bottles, but then to ship the bottled water costs more money and isn’t eco-friendly
• 96% of bottled water is sold in single-size polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles, which end up in city trash cans rather than recycling bins. The national recycling rate for all PET bottles, including soda bottles, is 23.1 percent
• About 4 billion PET bottles end up in the waste stream, costing cities around 70 million dollars a year in cleanup and landfill costs
• Bottled water costs around as much as a bottle of soda or juice, which obviously requires additional ingredients and processing, yet people pay for it
• Americans buy 28 billion water bottles a year, all that plastic and the energy used for manufacturing and transportation is very hard on the environment
• In addition to this, few bottles are recycled properly or reused but instead placed into the nearest trashcan
• Bottled water costs as much as $10 per gallon compared to less than a penny per gallon for tap waters
• Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006, enough fuel for more than 1 million United States cars for a year, and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide
• Some cities are considering taxes on bottled water, others are talking about bans on bottled water at city events, and even some restaurants have stopped selling bottled water in efforts to reduce waste
• If you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 dollars annually! The same amount of tap water would cost around 49 cents
• Bottled water often contains more bacteria and impurities than tap water, because the EPA regulates municipal water systems more stringently than the FDA regulates bottled water
• Worldwide, 2.7 million tons of plastic are used each year to make water bottles, and in the United States, less than 20% of these bottles are recycled
• Many things in this world get wasted, fill up our landfills, harming the environment and our health- don’t let bottled water, something so unnecessary and avoidable, be one of them