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.
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