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Further implications
One of the most obvious impacts of water sold in plastic bottles is what happens after the water has been consumed.
Despite recycling infrastructure that exists in order to facilitate the recycling of these bottles, according to the Container Recycling Institute, 86% of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage that ends up in landfills throughout the country. Considering that approximately 60 million plastic water bottles are used every day in the United States, we can assume that nearly 18,834,000,000 end up in the landfill each year. Each bottle can take up to 700 years to decompose.
Even more concerning, those bottles that do not end in landfill find their way into the world's rivers and oceans. Around 8 million tonnes of plastic went into the ocean in 2010, according to the most comprehensive study of plastic pollution so far. The international study calculated that 192 nations produced a total of 275 million tonnes of plastic waste. The largest amount of this waste was produced by China, at 1.32 to 3.52 million tonnes. This was followed by Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Australia added up to 13,888 tonnes of plastic litter per year, a quarter of which finds its way into waterways, according to study co-author Dr Chris Wilcox of CSIRO's Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship. Not all this plastic waste comes from discarded water bottles, however, they are a significant component.
It seems unlikely that the negative environmental impacts of increasing bottled water consumption are going to be solved by a ban. Where bans have occurred at universities and similar closed sites consumers have simply reverted to bottled soft drinks or similar products which pose the same disposal problems.
Biodegradable plastic water bottles and shopping bags are also regarded as a false solution to the ubiquitous problem of litter in the oceans. Most plastic is extremely durable, leading to large plastic debris and 'micro plastics' to spread via currents to oceans from the Arctic to the Antarctic, a recent United Nations report has found.
Greener plastics that breakdown in the environment have been marketed as a sustainable alternative that could reduce the vast amount of plastic waste that ends up in the sea after being dumped. However, Jacqueline McGlade, chief scientist at the United Nations Environment Programme, has stated that these biodegradable plastics were not a simple solution.
McGlade has noted, 'It's well-intentioned but wrong. A lot of plastics labelled biodegradable, like shopping bags, will only break down in temperatures of 50C and that is not the ocean. They are also not buoyant, so they're going to sink, so they're not going to be exposed to UV and break down.'
In the short term, effective waste collection and waste management systems must be put in place where they are needed most, in developing nations such as China, Indonesia and the Philippines where fast economic growth accompanied by increased waste is outpacing the capacity of infrastructure to manage this waste.
In the longer term, we must rethink how we use plastics with respect to function and desired lifetime of products. At the end of its life, discarded plastic should be considered a resource for capture and reuse, rather than simply a disposable convenience.