This Year Give Up Bottled Water for Lent

Posted by Tara Lohan, AlterNet at 5:22 PM on February 13, 2008.

This week the BBC reported on a new group getting on board the "think outside the bottle" mentality -- the church.

The patriarch of Venice is urging Catholics in the Italian city to give up bottled water for the Christian fasting season of Lent.

Angelo Cardinal Scola wants them to donate the money saved to a water pipeline project in Thailand.

Apparently he has the mayor's blessing on this as well. The mayor is apparently a tap-only drinker. But their decree may be falling on deaf ears. The story reports that "Nearly all Italians drink bottled water rather than the piped stuff. The industry is worth an estimated 3.2bn euros (£2.38bn) a year to the Italian economy."

But Scola and others have good reason to for their actions and the movement against bottled water is gaining steam among environmental groups -- particularly in the U.S. and Canada where campaigns have been waged by Polaris Institute, Food and Water Watch, and Corporate Accountability International.

A recent piece in the UK's Guardian, declared that "bottled water is set to be the latest battleground in the eco war."

As recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum feedstocks. 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 (10 balloons full of CO2) 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. To make the 29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world's biggest consumer of bottled water, requires more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year.

Given that water bottles suffer from lamentable recycling and reuse rates (the screw caps are usually of an unidentified plastic that doesn't fit into most local authority recycling schemes), the question is: what happens to our enormous pile of empties? The answer isn't encouraging. Most are landfilled (Americans throw 30m water bottles into landfill every day) or, in the UK, increasingly incinerated, where only a tiny proportion of their energy value can be recovered; the rest becomes environmental pollution, particularly in the ocean where, as the plastic slowly fragments, it poses a serious threat to wildlife .

The environmental threats are great -- and so are the threats to rural communities from where spring water is pumped.

But, thanks to groups like Polaris, FWW, and CAI, enviros are making progress. As the Guardian reports:

New York City launched a campaign to persuade people to cut back on bottled water use and return to good old tap water (officials claim it's the finest in the world); San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom banned city employees from using 'public money' to buy anything so ludicrous as imported water; while Chicago mayor Richard Daley brought in a five-cents-a-bottle tax on plastic bottles from the start of the year to limit the strain on municipal waste systems (currently the subject of a legal challenge from the water industry). On 1 February, the House of Representatives launched an investigation into the effect bottled water manufacturers have on health.

Now if we could just get those Catholics on board in Italy, we'd be on our way.

Tagged as: water, bottled water

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.