Environmental Benefits of Water Dispensers
When you consider the environmental benefits of water dispensers, it’s helpful to reverse it and look at the environmental impacts of the opposite: single-serving, single-use water bottles. You’ve likely seen the devastating images of once pristine scenes of nature strewn with trash and especially empty water bottles. But are those images built up just to play on our emotions? Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
When considering the impact of water bottles, it’s important to break that impact up into two phases. First, the bottle must be produced, then transported, and finally, discarded.
Water bottle production
It takes up to 17 million barrels of oil each year to produce the number of plastic bottles we consume as a society. To put that into perspective, we could fuel one million cars for a whole year, using the same amount of oil.
(Not So) Fun Fact: It requires three times as much water to produce a single water bottle than it does to fill one. The water used in production is considered unusable afterward due to chemical exposure.
Additionally, the production process for water bottles includes polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which requires an extreme amount of fossil fuel to produce and transport the bottles.
Bottle transport
According to some estimates, it takes up to a liter of oil to transport one bottle.
Discarding bottles
60,000,000 plastic water bottles are discarded each day in the US alone and 80% of those end up in landfills. Unfortunately, even when bottles are recycled, they are most likely being sent to China to be repurposed into textiles and other plastic-based products. While that’s better than a landfill, the fact that they aren’t reused as water bottles means that the same amount of energy must be used again to replace the used bottle with a brand new one, continuing the cycle.
Even worse, millions of pounds of plastic waste (largely from water bottles) end up in our oceans, hurting both wildlife and their fragile ecosystems.
So how is a water dispenser helping the environment?
By replacing single-use plastic water bottles with fresh, filtered water straight from a dispenser, you:
- Reduce or eliminate harmful chemicals possibly leaching into the water
- Protect animals and their habitats
- Lower the amount of waste ending up in landfills
- Save hundreds (possibly thousands!) of dollars per year