OREGON DEQ STUDY HIGHLIGHTS BENEFITS OF TAP WATER

Oregon Department of Environmental Quality's new assessment of drinking water delivery systems bolsters the argument to "reduce first, then recycle." The study, "Life Cycle Assessment of Drinking Water Delivery Systems: Bottled Water, Tap Water, and Home/Office Delivery Water," evaluates 48 different delivery scenarios among several variables to determine their overall environmental effects. Whereas common knowledge holds that tap water is an environmentally preferable method to bottled water, many often point to the buildup of used plastic bottles in landfills around the world as the culprit. This study, however, finds that it is not the disposal that has the greatest environmental impact, but the manufacture of the bottle itself. Regardless of whether a plastic bottle is 100% recycled or thrown in a landfill, its environmental impacts are still far greater than the tap water delivery system because of the energy and resources needed to produce the bottle in the first place. Even the best-performing bottled water scenario, requiring a light-weight recyclable bottle, has overall global warming effects greater than 46 times those of an identical volume of tap water.