There was an interesting article in The Guardian yesterday by Leo Hickman regarding the carbon footprint of tap water. Apparently piping water around the country to our homes produces around 0.5% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions or 4m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents every year. They also calculated the footprint of delivering 1 litre of water to our taps which came in at 0.298 grams of CO2 equivalents or greenhouse gases.
In a strange co-incidence I was out in town last night and noticed for the first time people were drinking Fiji bottled water. I had read somewhere how Fiji water was growing in popularity in the US but until last night had never come across it in the UK before. Seeing it made me remember an article I’d read online by Pablo at Triplepundit where he calculated the ‘true cost’ of a bottle of Fiji water.
Pablo’s calculations are based on transporting a 1 litre bottle of Fiji water from Fiji to San Francisco (8,700 km) so I have scaled up this part of his data to take into account the increased journey to London from Fiji (22,000 km). The result is the total amount of water required to produce and transport one bottle of imported water amounts to 7.84 kg (or litres) and the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in making it to the bar last night comes in at 484 grams. That makes the bottled water 1624 times more carbon intensive than tap water if my calculations are correct (please feel free to check!).
From the website…We all make assumptions. For instance, we assume that bottled water is better than water straight out of the tap. But is it?
Erm…no I think is the short answer to that question. Here’s a list of other reasons why drinking bottled water is environmental madness.
