Drink filtered water and fill up your bottle

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006, sold in bottles ranging from the 8-ounce aquapods popular in school lunches to the multi-gallon bottles found in family refrigerators and office water coolers. Most of this water was sold in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, requiring nearly 900,000 tons of the plastic. PET is produced from fossil fuels typically natural gas and petroleum.According to the plastics manufacturing industry, it takes around 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-liter plastic bottle, cap, and packaging. Making enough plastic to bottle 31.2 billion liters of water required more than 106 billion megajoules of energy. In 2004 the global consumption of bottled water reached 41 billion gallons, up 57 percent from five years earlier. According to the Earth Policy Institute, "Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasingly ”producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy.

The United States consumed 17 percent of that total more than any other country. Â Making bottles to meet Americans demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States arent recycled. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

Ironically, lots of water is used in the process of bottling water itself. To help save Earth, reuse a water bottle by filling it with tap water. If you are really concern about the purity of tap water, use a water filter instead.