Does bottled water remove water from the "cycle of water" and are there effects from this?
1 Answer
Bottled water does not really remove water from the water cycle unless a crate of bottle water sat in warehouse for 50 years so something like that.
Explanation:
Bottle water is essentially a new anthropogenic (human) pathway in the water cycle. Most of the water in bottled water is captured, transported, sold and consumed probably within a year or two. After that, it probably gets put back in the water cycle when humans urinate and it goes to a water treatment plant for processing.
The bigger impacts of bottled water include: huge amounts of energy and resulting CO2 are created in the manufacturing of plastic bottles, plus a huge amount of regular air pollution, and plastic bottles tend to end up scattered on the landscape or landfill site and become environmental problems. Its also not true that bottled water is healthier for you and in fact in some countries, it may be worse than tap water. Bottle water also competes with conventional tap water provided by municipalities and so makes the economics of delivering fresh water to our homes more costly.
