Bottled Water – Destructive and Useless

Water bottles. Cheap and easy, or non-reusable and destructive. Should our school stop selling plastic water bottles? 

One reason they should stop selling them is because they are distracting. People crinkle them, flip them and slide them back and forth on the table. It is very distracting to themselves and to others. 

Another reason is that they are expensive. A bottled water at the middle school commons is about $2.00. A cheap, reusable water bottle can be about $10.00. If you buy five plastic water bottles, that’s the same price as one reusable one. If you buy a plastic water bottle everyday, you would be spending about $364! Plastic water bottles are expensive in general. An estimated 90% of the water bottle’s cost is the bottle, cap and label. 

In addition, plastic water bottles are wasteful. They’re only good for one use, two if you’re lucky. Only one plastic water bottle is recycled for every six, and only 12% of the 35 billion discarded water bottles are recycled. Plastic water bottles are very wasteful to make as well. About three liters of water are used to make a one liter bottle. The making of plastic water bottles takes about 17 million barrels of oil per year. That could fill up one million cars per year! It also takes around 2000 times the amount of energy to make a plastic water bottle than to turn on a faucet. And to make it worse, every person in America drinks an average of more than 30 gallons of bottled water a year, meaning it takes 90 gallons of water just for one person to drink bottled water.  An estimated 783 million people don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water, and 90 gallons are about half of what one person would need for a year. 

Finally, plastic water bottles are destructive. Around 19 billion plastic water bottles are bought each year by Americans, and it takes around 1000 years for a single plastic bottle to break down. U.S. landfills are filling up with two million tons of trash and plastic. And plastic also gets in the ocean. Animals can die because of plastic, whether it’s because they eat it or if they get trapped in it. Of the top five trash items to be found in the ocean, plastic water bottles are #2. 

So before you buy your bottled water and waste a full $2.00, think about it first. Is it worth it?