Chloe K
Period.2
Cause and effect essay
10-26-14
Wasted Water
(The strong effects that water bottles have on the consumers and the environment)
Did you know that in 2009, United States consumers bought 8.45 billion gallons of bottled water? “Bottled water is a drain on the environment: The U.S. public goes through about 50 billion water bottles a year, and most of those plastic containers are not recycled” wrote Elizabeth Royte's in her 2008 novel Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It . Americans drink more and more water bottles each year. The cause of this popularity is because Americans think that bottled water is better than tap water or a safer option. It’s quite the opposite than what most stereotypes suggest. Americans spent thousands of dollars per gallon more for bottled water than they would for the water they have readily available coming from their taps.…show more content… Americans especially are the culprits who spend the most money for such a unfriendly product. In 2009, Americans spent $10.6 billion on water in plastic bottles. They paid about one thousand times the total cost of tap water. And the dirty truth is that fifty percent of all water bottles are filled with tap water! A growing number of water bottle companies are now using tap water because of how cheap it is to obtain and how readily available it is. There is no valid reason why here in America we need to use bottled water. In the U.S., our tap water is, by law, screened for hazardous pollutants. And yet, “Americans drink 21 gallons (79 liters) of bottled water per capita per year on average” according to the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York. The water bottle industry is extremely popular. So popular that it has outranked coffee, juice, and even milk, putting bottled water right behind the two most popular beverages, beer and