Happenings at District 4 OSSTF
Reasons Why Not to Drink Bottled Water
- Because water is a human right and not a commodity to be bought and sold for profit;
- Because bottled water corporations are changing the very way people think about water and undermining people's confidence in public water systems;
- Because up to 40% of bottled water in the U.S. and Canada is sourced from municipal tap water;
- Because some bottlers have run over communities' concerns and the environment when they extract water and build bottling plants to get local spring and ground water;
- Because bottled water travels many miles from the source, results in the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels, and contributes to the billions of plastic bottles ending up in our landfills;
- Because worldwide there is a need for investments in public water systems to ensure equal access to water, a key ingredient for prosperity and health for all people; and
- Because solutions to ensuring water as a fundamental human right require people acting together and standing up for public water systems.
- Bottled Water’s Carbon Footprint
- Last year, producing water bottles for American consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation.
- Bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2006.
- It takes three litres of water to produce one litre of bottled water.
- The PET (polyethylene terephthlate plastic) bottles this water is usually sold in require nearly 900,000 tons of plastic produced from fossil fuels.
- It takes around 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-litre plastic bottle, cap and packaging.
- Almost one-third of Canadian households drank primarily bottled water in 2006.
- In Ontario, 30 per cent of households with a municipal water supply drank primarily bottled water in 2006 and 17 per cent drank both bottled and tap water.
Source: The Pacific Institute and Statistics Canada
