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What do you make of that?

Do you drink bottled water?  I never quite understood the point of purchasing water when perfectly clean water comes through my tap, although I will admit I’ve bought the occasional bottle.  Turns out, I’m probably on to something with that line of thinking.

Some bottled water statistics:

• Americans spent $15 million on bottled water this year.  That’s more than we spent on movie tickets and iPods.
• Americans drink a billion bottles of water a week.
• Bottled water costs two to three times more than gasoline.  In fact, it costs about $10 a gallon.
• Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coke’s Dasani are only filtered tap water, but they represent 13% and 11% respectively of the bottled water market in America.
• You can buy a bottle of Evian water, drink it, and refill it with San Francisco’s tap water for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days before the refill water would cost as much as the original bottle of Evian.
• If our tap water cost as much as bottled water, our water bills would be about $9000 a month.
• We throw away 38 billion water bottles a year — more than $1 billion worth of plastic.
• Fiji Water bottles about 1 million bottles of water each day, but about half the residents of Fiji don’t have access to reliable drinking water.
• Bottled water is subject to less rigorous testing than city water systems.  The National Resources Defense Council tested 103 brands of bottled water and found that 22% of the brands contained at least one sample that exceeded strict state guidelines for allowable limits of chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic.
• Bottled water regulations allow for some E. coli contamination; however, tap water regulations prohibit any confirmed contamination with E. coli.
• Bottled water can be up to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water.
• 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.
• 1.5 billion barrels of oil, enough to fuel 100,000 U.S. cars for a year, are used in order to meet Americans’ demand for water each year.

Water statistics:

• 1.1 billion people, or one out of six people in the world has no dependable supply of clean water.
• San Francisco’s water is supplied from Yosemite National Park.  It is so clean and pure than the EPA doesn’t require it to be filtered.
• 1.8 million children die each year because they don’t have access to a reliable, clean supply of drinking water.
• Water-related diseases are the second largest killer of children worldwide, after respiratory infections.
• At any given time, about half the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-related illnesses.
• Households in rural Africa spend about 26% of their time fetching water.
• India and Pakistan spend 8 and 47 times more respectively on their military budgets than they do on water and sanitation.  Diarrhea claims 450,000 Indians per year and 118,000 Pakistanis.
• The average North American uses 40 times as much water as the average person in a developing country every day.

Just some food… or perhaps water?… for thought.

Read more (sources for statistics):

• Fast Company: Message in a Bottle
• National Geographic News: Bottled Water isn’t Healthier than Tap, Report Reveals
• NRDC: Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?
• Statistics: WaterAid

[tags]bottled water, water, statistics[/tags]