As far as things go, you would have thought that buying bottled natural spring water could not really be more eco friendly, after all it is only water, isn’t it?

Well yes of course it is it’s a pure product that occurs naturally in springs, after being filtered through the rock for thousands of years.

However according to the World watch Institute, the whole process from obtaining the product, right up to when the users have finished with it, is in fact not nearly as eco friendly as we all like to think that it is.

The main concerns are the water is being excessively extracted from streams and ground water, the preferred packaging for the pure mineral water is plastic, which is derived from oil, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is mainly used in the product of plastic bottles, yet hardly any of these are recycled, in fact around two million tons of these bottles are put into landfills within the USA every year, that is a lot of bottles, an finally the actual production process use very high amounts of energy and in the shipping of the finished product.

The market for bottled spring and mineral water are at an all time high worldwide, the US market alone is worth ten billion dollars, but with china emerging as another huge consumer market this figure is set to grow a lot higher.

Do you still think that bottled water is eco friendly?

Source [Supply Chainer]