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Water, water - and wasted plastic bottles - everywhere

LANDFILL REGULARS | Just 1 of every 5 water bottles is recycled

April 19, 2007

BY JANET RAUSA FULLER Staff Reporter/jfuller@suntimes.com

Americans spent nearly $11 billion last year on bottled water, making it the nation's second-favorite beverage, after soft drinks.

That's a lot of water -- and a lot of waste, environmental advocates say.

It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil -- enough to fuel 100,000 cars for a year -- to make the plastic bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water, according to the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., environmental think tank.

The kind of plastic most commonly used for water bottles -- polyethylene terephthalate, or PET -- is recyclable. But consumers recycle just one of every five bottles they drink, with the rest ending up in landfills, said Pat Franklin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute, a Washington group that promotes recycling.

"It's wasted energy and wasted resources that are being landfilled unnecessarily," Franklin said.

In Paris, fashion designer Pierre Cardin designed and gave away water carafes to encourage residents there to choose local tap water over bottled water.

Cardin could be on to something. Research suggests that bottled water, while it may appear virtuous, with all those pictures of pristine valleys and snowcapped mountains on their labels, might be no purer that ordinary tap water -- and that at least a quarter of the bottled water sold might actually be tap water.

A 1999 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental lobbying group, found holes in the way the bottled-water industry is regulated, with the federal Food and Drug Administration having no rules about how bottled water should be filtered or kept free of pathogens -- as must be done for tap water. The NRDC tested more than 100 types of bottled water and found "spotty" quality, with a third of the brands containing contaminants such as arsenic in at least some samples, said Adrianna Quintero, an attorney for the group.

"The problem with bottled water is we really have no way of knowing what we're getting," Quintero said.

There's an alternative, experts say, and it's cheaper: Buy a reusable bottle, and fill it with tap water, which is stringently regulated.

But if you still want to buy bottled water, they suggest picking a domestic brand over one that was shipped halfway across the globe, giving the environment a break by using less fuel to ship it -- and then recycle the bottle.