According to European Environment Agency 98.5% of the test in Europe meets the minimums standards for tapped water in EU for drinking, cooking and other domestic purposes. Many countries in Europe have chlorine added to the public water systems to disinfect waterborne diseases. The added chlorine makes the water experience bad, which make people to buy plastic bottled water. The plastic bottled water has 3 issues; plastic waste/recycling, transportation and high water consumption in production.
The annual global consumption of plastic bottles is set to top half a trillion by 2021, which by far outstrips recycling efforts and jeopardises oceans, coastlines and the environment as a whole. The demand, which translates into about 20.000 bottles being sold every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable global desire for plastic bottled water, which especially has accelerated in recent years as the urbanised, and primarily western, ‘on the go’ culture has seen its rise globally. Plastic bottles used for water or soft drinks are, for the most part, made from polyethylene terephthalate, which is highly recyclable – but as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up. More than 480 billion plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016, of which less than 50% were collected for recycling, and only 7% of the collected bottles were turned into new bottles, with all the remaining bottles ending up in landfills or in the ocean. It is estimated, that between 5-13 million tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, causing enormous environmental.
In 2007 the global bottled water consumption was 212 billion L and rose to 391 billion L in 2017. It was calculated by Gleick and Cooley that the 212 billion L in 2007 needed 54 million barrels of oil for production which is estimated 2000 times higher than it is required for tapped water. According to Grohe seven liters of water are needed to put just one liter of bottled water on a supermarket shelf. That is a big amount of wasted water.
The energy used to transport the bottled water depends mainly on how far it is shipped and what transportation method is used. Air cargo is the costliest energy method, followed by truck, cargo ship and rail shipping, in that order. Gleick and Cooley used the examples of different types of water shipped. Water produced locally and shipped by truck involved the least amount of energy, followed by water sent by cargo ship from Fiji, with water produced in France and shipped by cargo ship and rail having the highest energy costs. Bottled water of different brands is distributed to the entire world from supplier to distributor and from distributor to supermarkets. Then again from super market to people's homes.
