XPost: talk.environment

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/08/05/bottled-water-is-3-500-times-worse-for-the-environment-than-tap-water-say-scientists

Tap water is thousands of times better for the environment than
bottled water, according to scientists. In fact, it takes three times
as much water to produce a plastic bottle as it can hold.

This might not come as a surprise but researchers at the Barcelona
Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) have crunched the numbers to
work out just how much better it actually is.

The research focused on Barcelona, Spain which is home to around 1.35
million people - nearly 60 per cent of whom consume bottled water at
least some of the time.

They used something called a “life cycle assessment” which estimates
the environmental impact of an item over its entire lifespan. That
includes the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing,
transportation, distribution, use and disposal.

In the US alone water bottle manufacturing takes 1.5 million barrels
of oil every year - more than it would take to power 100,000 homes.
And that is without the fossil fuel or emissions costs of
transporting them to shops.

The ISGlobal study found that if every resident in Barcelona switched
to bottled water, extracting the raw materials would cost more than
€70 million and lead to the loss of 1.43 animal species every year.

This would be 1400 times more of an impact on ecosystems and 3500
times higher cost to the environment for resources, than if the whole
city were to drink tap water instead.

# Are there any health risks to tap water?

The use of bottled water has risen in recent years in part due to
factors such as taste, odour, marketing campaigns and lack of public
faith in the quality of tap water.

ISGlobal researcher Cristina Villaneuva says there have been
substantial improvements in the quality of tap water in Barcelona
over the last few years.

“However, this considerable improvement has not been mirrored by an increase in tap water consumption, which suggests that water
consumption could be motivated by subjective factors other than
quality.”

One of the problems is the perceived presence of chemical compounds
such as trihalomethanes. In an innovative move, data about the
lifecycle of bottled water was also compared to a framework that is
used to measure health.

They found that any risk to health was small and adding a domestic
filtration system reduced that risk considerably.

“Our results show that considering both the environmental and the
health effects, tap water is a better option than bottled water,
because bottled water generates a wider range of impacts”, says
ISGlobal researcher Cathryn Tonne.

I wish that tap water is used more for drinking. Unfortunately the tap
water here in the Philippines is mostly not safe to drink.

--
Job Bautista

An XUL fanatic, and an add-ons developer. I also do some simple
userscripts and bash scripting.

I like Cyndaquil. He's obviously the best Pokemon starter. Every Johto
Pokemon is cool too.

http://rw.rs/~job/

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XPost: talk.environment

In sci.environment Job Bautista <[email protected]> wrote:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/08/05/bottled-water-is-3-500-times-worse-for-the-environment-than-tap-water-say-scientists

...

?Our results show that considering both the environmental and the
health effects, tap water is a better option than bottled water,
because bottled water generates a wider range of impacts?, says
ISGlobal researcher Cathryn Tonne.

I wish that tap water is used more for drinking. Unfortunately the tap
water here in the Philippines is mostly not safe to drink.

When I was a kid we lived on the edge of a desert in outback Australia.
The only tap water came from 100s of km away via a huge steel pipe.
When you filled the bath up with it it was rusty and brown.
Noone in the town ever drank it, unless maybe if they were blind drunk.

For drinking every house had a YUGE water tank in the back yard up on
a brick stand so even if it was almost empty there would be enough
pressure to get it up the pipe into the tap over the sink.

Even on the edge of a desert it rained enough to keep the tank 1/2 full.

It was bewdiful stuff.

We only stayed there a few years. Police/military family. We moved a lot.

A few years later we were in a big city where tap water was good.
It also turned out rainwater havesting -- good enough for the Romans
2000y back -- was illegal. Some pencip pusher somewhere had decided
rainwater tanks that had been a feature of even large cities in the area
kept water out of the sewer system and allowing it to dry out and cause
damage.

At least that was the official explanation for the law.

Flash forward a few decades and water supplies in the same city are
now starting to fall below levels that can supply the growing population.
The state govt is begging people to build rainwater tanks.

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