A. Oil is used to make and process new plastic bottles.
B. Fossil fuels power the shipment of empty bottles to bottling plants (sometimes from overseas by boat or plane).
C. Full bottles are put into an army of semi-trucks and transferred to local distributors. Some are even shipped thousands of miles to and from foreign countries.
D. Local delivery trucks, using more gas, bring the bottles from distribution centers to stores, where the bottles are purchased.
Bottled water is purchased.
E. After the bottles are discarded, a different fleet of trucks (also fueled by gas, of course) transfers them to recycling centers, some of which are overseas.
F. The empty bottles are recycled using, you guessed it, more oil.
G. The recycled plastic is finally transported to new factories to make new products. How does it get there? On trucks that use gas, of course.
Plastic water bottles are one of the fastest growing sources of municipal waste. 85% of them aren’t recycled.
Actually, oil and bottled water do mix.
There’s been a lot of focus on the plastic waste created by the bottled water trend, but there’s an even bigger way bottled water impacts us. The amount of oil used in the processing and shipping of bottles to factories, consumers, and finally to landfills and recycling centers is, well, pretty impressive: 1.5 million barrels a year. That’s enough to power 250,000 homes for one year.
Doesn't recycling the bottle help?
Well, yes and no. Recycling is better than throwing the bottle in a landfill, but 90% of the environmental impact has already happened before you even buy the bottled water. Not to mention all the energy used in the process of recycling.