Water off the shelf – popularity of bottled water – Checkout Line

An article addressing the cultural disparity in the bottled water craze.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4021/is_n4_v19/ai_19566159

Sometimes, the world is so small. I have a friend finishing her graduate degree at University for Peace – a UN sponsored school in Costa Rica. Her friend and sidekick, Emily Arnold, wrote a report in 2006 on bottled water for Earth Policy’s website.

Click here to read Emily Arnold’s piece on bottled water…

ECO-SPUN CLOTHING (now Eco-fi)

http://www.eartheasy.com/wear_ecospun.htm

Eco-spun is a synthetic polyester fiber that is used to create fleece fabrics used in many high end clothing products made by companies such as Patagonia, Sierra Club, Blue Lotus, etc.

The clothing is actually quite hard to find, in the mainstream stores. I’ve been able to find it online as well as in specialty shops. It’s a bit more expensive, but its marketed to the outdoorsman, due to it’s soft texture, and warm, durable, waterproof features. The price is probably comparable to other high end hiking or workout clothing.

I found A02 socks online that were about $15 per pair – equivalent to what I would pay for higher end, waterproof running socks in the past. They also had hybrid socks, with a combination of products, including Ecospun.

It presents some interesting information about the process that recycles the bottles and creates the fiber. Wellman, the manufacturer, makes this claim:

“ Wellman has the capacity to keep almost 3 billion plastic PET soda bottles out of the world’s landfills each year, saving over 1/2 million barrels of oil and eliminating 400,000 tons of harmful air emissions which contribute to acid rain, global warming and smog. The amount of petroleum saved by using post-consumer bottles instead of virgin materials in the manufacturing process annually is enough to supply power to a city the size of Atlanta for an entire year!“

FOSS MANUFACTURING: Eco-Fi

Another company producing fabric from recycled bottles, Foss produces Eco-Fi. This synthetic fiber is created from 100% recycled plastic PET bottles, and is used in clothing, blankets, carpets, auto interiors and more. “AN EASY GUIDE: 10 bottles = 1 pound of fiber“

Foss has gotten quite a bit of press from various news outlets, but again, their products are hard to find and don’t seem to be widely advertised in the mainstream. They offer interesting statistics, as well as the lifecycle of how the fabric is made:

Facts

• Two million plastic bottles are used in the U.S. every ten minutes and 51 billion plastic bottles go into landfills annually.
• The 51 billion plastic bottles in U.S. landfills end-to-end would wrap around the earth 5 times.
• It will take 700 years before plastic bottles in landfills start to decompose.
• Less than 30% of plastic bottles in the U.S. are actually recycled.
• Currently only 11 U.S. states have direct deposit.

Lifecycle of Eco-fi:
Plastic PET containers are picked up at curbside and community recycling centers, and then sorted by type and color. They are stripped of their labels and caps, washed, and crushed, then chopped into flake. These tiny pieces are melted and extruded to create fiber. The fiber produced is crimped, cut, drawn and stretched into desired length for strength, then baled. The baled fiber can be processed into fabric for a variety of textile product end uses.

OZITE TEXTILES: Carpets

Ozite uses 100% Eco-spun in their products, which are mostly indoor/outdoor carpets (used outside in patios and garages, or in basements). They offer more information on their website, and seem to be more accessible. They don’t sell directly to the public, but their products are available in mainstream stores like Home Depot.

They seem to be popular with the racing and auto industries because of their durability, and steadfastness.

PBS Point of View: A ten minute video with interesting facts about bottled water.

Recycled Clothing: A video presented by Newsweek about recycled bottles being used in the fashion industry.

Pimp My Ride – Bio-Impala: MTV’s popular show does a clip for Earth Day using Ozite, fabric made from recycled bottles.

The History Channel at one point had an episode on processing of bottles into spun fabric, that seems to be no longer listed under their Boneyard website.

An extensive article that journeys “into the economics–and psychology–of an unlikely business boom. And what it says about our culture of indulgence.”

Message in a Bottle, by Charles Fishman

An interesting project sponsored by Corporate Accountability International, the website focuses on taking a pledge to “Think Outside the Bottle”. It asks individuals and groups to pledge to try and choose tap water over bottled water.

http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/tob/

They currently have close to 25,000 people signing the online pledge. They’ve also included a map of cities, institutions and restaurants who have chosen to take the pledge. Some interesting statistics presented by the site:

“Up to 40% of bottled water comes from the same source as tap water, but is sold back to consumers at hundreds of times the cost. Producing bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year – and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.“

“The United Nations warns that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population – more than five billion people– will lack access to water. “

“Corporations like Coke, Nestlé, and Pepsi have manufactured demand for bottled water through years of misleading advertising – building a market by eroding confidence in public tap water. In reality, the tap is more highly regulated and doesn’t generate billions of pounds of plastic waste.”

“Just a handful of corporate giants are driving this global water grab, and it is growing. Supplying water is already a $400 billion a year business–30% larger than the pharmaceutical industry.”

An interesting set of facts from the website:

• Seventy-four percent of Americans drink bottled water, and one in five drinks only bottled water.
• Worldwide, consumers spent $100 billion on bottled water in 2005.
• Each year more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter.
• Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year – and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

There’s been more and more info about the potential of recycling bottles, and creating products from the recycled materials.

Recycled plastic – the fashion fabric of the future

Northumbria University PhD student Yukie Nakano is working on a project that addresses how recycled bottles can be used in the production of textiles. She cites that businesses often are interested in using recycled materials, but that there often isn’t enough information.

“One of the ways of increasing use of recycled materials in the fashion industry is to enhance the look of the fabric and Yukie is developing methods to convert raw fibre into texturally rich yarn and producing new types of fabric with visual or tactile aesthetic qualities.”

She participated in the EcoTextile Conference in 2004, and was published in the Ecotextiles: The way forward for sustainable development in textiles.

And, finally, from Chemistry Web Magazine, an article about the production of fabric from the bottles based on Nakano’s research – Fashionable and Recyclable.

“Bottlegloves – the gloves are made from recycled PET, which was originally used to make the bottles.”

Not directly related to the bottled water issue, but along the same lines. In general it means being a more aware consumer.

25 Ways to Save Water

BottlesandCans.com

The California Conservation Department runs the Bottles and Cans website which gives California residents the skinny on how, what and where they can recycle not only bottles, but cans and glass.

The Consumer Recycling Calculator lets consumers see how much money they could make by recycling. Considering one of the biggest problems with bottled water happens to be the fact that consumers are – on average – not recycling, this seems to be a valuable resource.

Michael Niman is a professor at Buffalo State College who reflects on the issues of bottled water. He spotlights Fiji Water as one example, but points out the resounding issues with bottled water in itself.

Bottled Insanity, originally published in ArtVoice

He coins the term “designer water” and uses Fiji Water and their artesian water as an example. He points out that the positives with the bottled water craze in that it means people are drinking less sugar-laden soda – one contributing factor to the obesity crisis in the US.

But he points out the irony of the situation at hand: that oftentimes we are living in areas with some of the best and cleanest tap water in the world (like the Great Lakes, in his example), and yet we buy water that is transported from half way around the world.

In addition, we have people living in places like Fiji, where there are often critical water shortages. And a huge plant sits in the middle of it, with hundreds of thousands of filled water bottles.

“Currently it takes about 63 million gallons of oil per year to manufacture disposable water bottles for US consumption.”

Fossil fuels are burned in order to produce, box, transport and ship bottled water. He points out that this energy-intensive process ends 85% of the time in a landfill, where PET bottles are incinerated and release toxins, and can take 1000 years to degrade.