How Much Oil is Needed to Produce the Plastic Bottles?
Most of our critics cite a prominent anti-bottled water activist claim, using 2002 data, they state that it takes 17 million barrels of oil in a year to produce water containers. What they don’t tell us is exactly how they calculate this number. Life Cycle Analysis from PlasticsEurope -- when applied to 2005 U.S. production numbers – indicates that it takes 6 million barrels of oil to produce a year’s worth of water containers. Note that the years of the two studies aren’t the same, and Europeans make plastic products slightly differently, but it surely seems that there has been a nearly threefold exaggeration by the activists. While this 6-million-barrels number sounds big, it is important to put it into meaningful perspective: the U.S. Department of Energy calculates the total annual U.S. consumption of oil at 7.55 billion barrels per year. That’s billion with a “b.” The 6 million barrels of oil needed for bottled water is therefore less than one-one thousandth of this amount. When on-the-go convenience and sufficient hydration for millions of people are factored in, the relatively small portion of total oil (less than eight hours of the annual U.S. oil supply for one year’s worth of containers) we use for plastic bottles seems well worth the investment. Consider on top of that all the public and industry recycling efforts and we have a manageable resource made more so by methodical single-stream curbside recycling collection methods. So drink up, but recycle those empties properly.
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The point is, That hardly anyone, ANYONE, (roughly 10-15%) of people are actually going to "recycle" their empty bottles, and other side is just going to carelessly throw their away and expect nothing out of it. If you go through the steps of making the plastic , bottling the water , shipping the water out to different markets, and then picking them back up in waste, That's 1/4 of a bottle of oil were using. That kind of carbon emission footprinting is what is destroying this world ever so slowly. Change needs to be made, whether in the form of banning bottled water as a whole, or putting higher taxes on the merchandise itself.
I don't know where we get people like that. Recycling is fascist? Whatever. I always thought that fascist dictatorships did far worse things than to ask people to recycle, but that's just me.
But let's get to what's real:
First off, recycling plastic IS inefficient. So, recycling a bottle is nowhere near as good as simply not using the bottle to begin with. The bottles are full of air. Which means you're driving trucks full of mostly air, to deliver the recycling. The trucks are using, you guessed it, oil ! It doesn't eliminate the benefit but it does reduce it by a pretty substantial percentage. Second, the plastic from the recycle isn't top-grade plastic, and needs to be mixed with virgin plastic in order to be used again. Recycling is better than landfilling, but not by as much as you might guess.
Second, do consider that quarter of a bottle of oil that you're wasting on every water bottle. If you put that much gas in your car, how far would you go? Think about how you can reduce your gasoline usage - it's a FAR bigger culprit than the plastic bottle is. A bottle is a few ounces, and a car trip just about anywhere is a freakin' gallon or more. Sure, we could reduce the oil usage in plastics, but we should put that effort where it will do the most good. One extra trip downtown = a number of bottles. If bottles are evil, cars are Stalin, Darth Vader, Exxon and BP all rolled into one. Yet, we are dependent on these things. All I'm saying is, don't squander.
As far as carbon goes, our big huge problems include land use and deforestation, as well as energy squandered in transportation . Plastic bottles are way down on the list, and if you seriously want to make a positive change , there are HUGE problems out there to tackle. Plastic bottles are a problem, but they're a small problem in the grand scheme of things.
It is a waste of my time and money to bother with recycling. Fat lot of good green fascism does.
Oh, worried about carbon emissions ?
STOP exhaling: YOU are 'destroying' the planet