Brighter Planet

The EPA’s standards for tap water are stricter than the FDA’s bottled water standards — in fact lots of bottled water is just municipal tap water in a bottle. Yet in in 2007 Americans drank 8.8 billion gallons of bottled water. Just manufacturing the plastic bottles for all that water produced over 2.7 million tons of CO₂. That’s equivalent to six months of emissions from an average coal power plant. If we all drank half as much bottled water as we do, the emissions reductions would be equivalent to taking 225,000 cars off the road.