The Untapped Truth: Bottled Water Contributes to Our Climate and Water Crises

FACT SHEET The Untapped Truth: Bottled Water Contributes to Our Climate and Water Crises Every minute, more than 1 million plastic bottles of water are sold around the world.1 The United States ends up recycling only 6 percent of the total plastic it uses,2 and the vast majority (85 percent) of single-use water bottles across the world enter landfills, where they take up to a millennium to degrade. [...] Even though nearly two-thirds of water bottled in the United States comes from municipal water systems, the bottled water industry actively encourages distrust of municipal water systems that are vital to public health and water resilience.5 The industry also targets low-income communities in its advertisements — the same communities that disproportionately suffer from federal and state disinvestm. [...] Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates is needed to maintain and improve the nation’s drinking water infrastructure over the next two decades.12 At the same time, the rapidly growing and highly profitable market for bottled water is masking the inability of the public water supply system to provide clean drinking water for all.13 Corporations have pointed to the underfunding of public wat. [...] For instance, Unilever and Nestlé require an estimated 3.3 and 4.1 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water, respectively.29 On top of the water used during the production process, a significant amount of additional water is used during the oil drilling to obtain raw materials for plastic and the plastic bottle production process — both of which have additional environmental impacts.30. [...] ORG These violations sow seeds of distrust in public water systems — messages that are amplified by the bottled water industry through targeted marketing tactics towards low-income communities, people of color, and immigrants.47 This may contribute to the disparities in spending on bottled water as the share of household income spent on bottled water for Black and Brown families in the U.