The large beverage companies maintain that the impacts of more plastic circulating around the world can be mitigating by through better recycling programs, as well packaging innovations such as plant-based PET bottles.
“PepsiCo is already one of the largest purchasers of recycled PET in the consumer goods industry,” said Roberta Barbieri, vice president of global water and environmental solutions at PepsiCo in Purchase, N.Y. “We have set a goal that, by 2025, 100 percent of our packaging will be designed to be recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable.” Two Words: Plastic Pollution Despite the amount of shade being cast at bottled water, the industry keeps booming.
That global number could could surge to a 324 billion by 2021, according to the market research firm Euromonitor “All of that plastic takes a tremendous amount of fossil fuels to make,” said Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, an environmental group largely focused on water and climate.
Glieck told Bloomberg Environment it takes about 25 million barrels of oil per year just to produce the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic used in most single-used bottles.
“We need to find better materials to make bottles that include recycled and renewable content, and of course reduce environmental impacts by making fewer disposable bottles in the first place,” Darby Hoover, senior resource specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, told Bloomberg Environment.
“Right now, the recycling rate for the plastics used in these bottles is only about 30 percent, meaning that 70 percent still ends up in landfills.
Bottle vs.
“They more they take, the more it creates this wedge between people and their municipal drinking water supply.” Kirkwood pointed out that bottled water companies compete directly with municipal systems and cost hundreds of times more than tap water.
Companies Push Back But beverage companies reject the idea that bottled water represents a kind of existential threat to tap water.
Some nations are forced to import water when domestic sources are not potable or are insufficient for immediate needs, as is the case in some Pacific Islands during drought.