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October 24, 2007
The Daily Tar Heel
Which is better, Nalgene or Dasani?
By: Joshua Nardin, Guest Columnist
Joshua Nardin is a sophomore living in Morrison sustainable housing.
If you have been but faintly attuned to environmental clamor on campus, there's a good chance that you have heard ill of disposable water bottles.
After listening to someone give a free Nalgene pitch and swear on their grandmother's grave that tap water is both safe and delicious, you go one of two ways.
You either purchase a fancy new Nalgene and force yourself to adjust to the taste of tap water, or you continue to use disposable bottles with slight agitation that someone has tried to undermine to your water-drinking ways.
The following article is not meant to persuade but rather to evoke critical thought concerning the use of water bottles.
The problem at hand with plastic water bottles is that despite the renewable potential of plastics, many of the water bottles sold never make it to recycling plants.
According to the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit organization with the goal of increasing the recovery and recycling rate of beverage containers, eight out of 10 plastic water bottles used in the United States end up in landfills. This number has grown by 10 percent since 1996 and closely reflects the global rate of wasted plastics.
According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, the amount of bottled water consumed worldwide has steadily increased in the past five years and has reached an estimated total of 41 billion gallons in 2004.
With such a large percentage of the plastic used for bottling water ending up in landfills, the increasing demand for bottled water presents a potential ecological concern.
Another concern regarding the reuse of plastics is the considerable difficulty of recycling them.
Although plastics, and in particular polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - the polymer used to make plastic beverage containers - can be completely recycled, the recovery process for plastics is much more complicated than for metals or glass.
Before the recovering of the plastic polymer, the bottles must first be collected, separated by color and isolated from their caps and labels. Also, the energy required to melt and mix plastics is very high.
To be fair, water bottles are by no means void of beneficial qualities. Indeed, the convenience of disposable water bottles alone is what probably drives the bottled water industry.
Consumers respond well to products that are readily available, cheap, and useful, and bottled water is just that. It is a sanitary and easy method to distribute water to a large amount of people.
Also, plastic water bottles are durable and lightweight, which makes for more efficient transportation and delivery of the product.
The challenge then is not to demonize the water bottle industry but rather to increase consumer awareness of the global impact of the plastic bottles.
The misuse of water bottles, and other plastics for that matter, is inherently a nonsustainable practice because of the time required for plastic decomposition - close to a century.
Plastic bottles are an integral part of how people drink water, without a doubt.
But efforts on an individual basis to be mindful of personal plastic usages might help to alleviate the tremendous amount of plastics that are being dumped.
http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2007/10/24/Opinion/Which.Is.Better.Nalgene.Or.Dasani-3051650.shtml
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