Plastic Bottles

Waste

There are many studies that explain the impact of plastic waste on our environment. An extreme visual example of this can be found in the Pacific Garbage Patch.

According to an article by The New York Times in November 2009 ... "Light bulbs, bottle caps, plastic water bottles, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas...

...Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.

But once it does split into pieces, the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions and more of these particles are floating in the world's trash-filled gyres. PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemicals cannot dissolve in water, but the plankton absorbs them like a sponge. Fish that feed on plankton ingest the tiny plastic particles. Scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation say that fish tissues contain some of the same chemicals as the plastic. The scientists speculate that toxic chemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat. The researchers say that when a predator — a larger fish or a person — eats the fish that eats the plastic, that predator may be transferring toxins to its own tissues, and in greater concentrations since toxins from multiple food sources can accumulate in the body.

..."Researchers measure the amount of plastic in each sample and calculate the weight of each fragment. They also test the tissues of any fish caught in the nets to measure for toxic chemicals. One rainbow runner from a previous voyage had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach. The research team has not tested the most recent catch for toxic chemicals, but the water samples show that the amount of plastic in the gyre and the larger Pacific is increasing. Water samples from February 2009 contained twice as much plastic as samples from a decade ago. "This is not the garbage patch I knew in 1999," Mr. Moore said. "This is a totally different animal." For the captain's first mate, Jeffery Ernst, the patch was "just a reminder that there's nowhere that isn't affected by humanity."

While the plastic that is discarded in the world comes from multiple sources, according to a NAPCOR study, water bottles account for 50% of all the PET bottles and containers collected by curbside recycling, and the recycling rate for water bottles is only 23.4%.

Americans use and dispose over 50 billion plastic water bottles, spending about $15 billion dollars in bottled water a year. In other words, the average American uses 167 single-use plastic water bottles each year. It is not hard to assume that the market is in need of rapid change if not for cost, for environmental reasons.

Health

While we believe that the water contained in the bottle with the attractive spring image comes directly from a fresh water spring, the reality is that most bottled water nowadays is nothing else than purified municipal water packaged in bottling factories around the world.

The water then sits in a plastic container in a warehouse waiting to be shipped to their destination before consumption. Depending on how well these bottles have been stored, changes in temperature will increase the speed in which the chemicals used in the bottle seep into the water which is then consumed. Over 60 million bottles of water are consumed daily in US alone- the majority of these find their way into landfills. 

A Harvard study supports what many public health specialists have long assumed: Hard plastic 1 and 5 gallon jugs containing bisphenol A (BPA) are leaching notable amounts of the controversial chemical into people's bodies.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found that people who drank for a week from the clear plastic polycarbonate bottles increased concentrations of bisphenol A (BPA) in their urine by 69 percent. The study is the first to definitively show that drinking from BPA bottles increases the levels of the chemical in urine, researchers said. It was published on the website of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

BPA is used in hundreds of everyday products. It is used to make reusable, hard plastic bottles more durable for both single serve bottles as well as one gallon and five gallon jugs.