Some Appalling Facts About the Damage to Our Environment    

There is enough plastic bottles discarded which if laid end to end would circle the earth 150 times and this happens EVERY year.

Bottled Water uses precious fossil fuels in the manufacture of the bottles, filling the bottles, transporting the bottles to the shops, transporting the bottles to our homes and transporting the bottles to our municipal dumps or to be recycled.

This means that 1 Billion Pounds of CO2 is emitted in the transportation of bottled water.

New research shows that drinking a bottle of water has the same impact on the environment as driving a car for a kilometre.

There's enough oil used in the production process of water bottles in the UK to keep 17,000 cars on the road for a year.

Which? found that half of the population cannot taste the difference between the tap and bottled water.

In the UK we consume 13bn litres of bottled water a year. You can easily see in a visit to any supermarket that most bottled water is siphoned into PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles and of the 13bn plastic bottles sold in the UK last year, depressingly just 3bn were recycled.

In the US alone 2.5 million tons of CO2 were produced by the manufacture of 30 billion litres of bottles water in 2006. These numbers are expected to increase by 51% by 2011!

It takes 17.3 gallons of fuel to transport 1000 gallons of bottled water.

Manufacturing & filling plastic water bottles consumes at least 3 times the amount of water as the bottle will ultimately contain.

As recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials. It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) just to manufacture a one-litre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions per empty bottle. Extrapolate this for the developed world (2.4m tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year) and it represents serious oil use for what is essentially a single-use object.

Total oil required to manufacture, fill, transport & dispose of a plastic bottle will fill that bottle ¼ with oil! (Pacific Institute)

That’s an incredible 714 million gallons (17 million barrels) of oil are consumed each year to produce disposable plastic water bottles

The oil used to produce disposable water bottles could be used to power 1 million cars for 12 months

2 Million tons of plastic bottles are landfilled every year!(Worldwatch Institute)

Just 1/10 water bottles are recycled (Container Recycling Institute)

Plastic can take 700 to 1,000 Years to biodegrade 

PET bottles recycled in many parts of the world are often exported - as far away as China again adding to the resources used.

Reusing your plastic water bottles is not exactly a safe solution either.  The repeated use of common disposable bottles (PET) can cause the plastic to break down and leach chemicals into your drinking water.

Most of us are becoming increasingly aware that we need to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle and using an ECOtanka is a great way to start.  Make a Difference.