Discouraging Bottled Water

Over the last six years, bottled water consumption has gone up 60
percent in the United States. That means a lot of plastic bottles are
being thrown out. As Brad Linder reports, businesses and local
governments across the country are trying to encourage people to cut
back on bottled water:

Transcript

Over the last six years, bottled water consumption has gone up 60
percent in the United States. That means a lot of plastic bottles are
being thrown out. As Brad Linder reports, businesses and local
governments across the country are trying to encourage people to cut
back on bottled water:


Environmentally-conscious restaurants around the country have begun
removing bottled water from their menus. And the city of New York has
launched a new advertising campaign to convince citizens to drink tap
water. They tout it as “fat-free,” and “delicious.”


Susan Neely is the president of the American Beverage Association. She
says these campaigns miss the point:


“We need clean, accessible, safe tap water. But there’s great advantages
to bottled water, too. It’s portable, it’s convenient. And we can more
easily do what doctors and nutritionists are telling us to do, which is to drink more
water, particularly in these hot summer months.”


Neely says plastic bottles make up only one third of one percent of the
nation’s waste, and that’s not including the bottles that are recycled.


But not every bottle gets recycled. And it takes both energy and
petroleum to produce and distributed bottled water. That’s why cities
like New York are promoting tap water as an environmentally-friendly
alternative.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brad Linder.

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