Everyone wants to keep Australia beautiful but habits such as drinking bottled water often let us down. After all, Australia has some of the cleanest drinking water on the planet, so you’d think peddling bottled water here would be like selling ice to Eskimos! But we spend over $1 billion a year on the bottled variety, even though it costs around 2000 times more than tap water. So, if we want to keep Australia beautiful, we all need to understand just why we need to change our ways.
Keep Australia Beautiful is an organisation promoting sustainable living that hopes eventually to eliminate litter. Last year, litter cost the economy over $350 million. Keep Australia Beautiful Week (August 17-23) highlights easy ways all of us can use less plastic and reduce landfill.
To mark the week, here at BIBO HQ we’ve investigated what we can all do to help the environment and stop plastic waste clogging up our creeks and oceans.
the facts about bottled water
- Over five million Aussies consume bottled water in an average week.
- Every 12 months we buy over 726 million litres.
- A third of the litter collected during Keep Australia Beautiful Week is plastic. A plastic bottle takes up to 1000 years to break down.
- In Australia, the packaging, transportation and chilling of water in bottles creates 60,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually – that’s the equivalent of 13,000 cars on the road for a whole year.
- During one clean up, over 1500 plastic bottle tops were found on a single beach in the Whitsundays.
- Tap water costs around $0.002 per litre while the average litre of bottled water is $3.50. Therefore, if you drink a litre a day, during a year you’d spend just 73c on the former and $1277 on the latter.
let’s keep Australia beautiful… and stay healthy!
In taste tests, tap water scores the same as the bottled variety, but many of us are still lured into splashing out because we associate some brands with health and wellness. But is that true?
- Microplastic particles were found in 93% of bottled water samples in a US study by Orb Media.
- Health standards for tap water are much higher than for bottled. The quality is tested 24 hours a day.
- A BIBO Water Bar uses the latest, multi-stage, carbon filter as well as ultraviolet lamp technology to filter and purify your tap water to much higher quality than water from plastic bottles.
- Consumer group CHOICE found some Aussie bottled water brands were just filtered tap water. A BIBO Water Bar means you can get instant filtered and chilled water at the press of a button – if you switch from bottled water, you’ll potentially save more in the first year than the cost of buying the unit!
BIBO vs single use bottles
Your BIBO Water Bar comes with a robust, reusable glass bottle in eight vibrant colours that will last for years. By using it for just four years, you could prevent up to 2,000 plastic bottles from reaching endangered wildlife both on land and in the sea. And if you need another, it’s super easy to order online.
Some consumers say they aren’t keen on tap water because it has a slight chlorine taste. But this can be eliminated through BIBO’s purification and filtering, meaning there’s no need to rely on bottled water.
And if you love sparkling water, all you have to do is fill a Soda Stream bottle from your BIBO Water Bar and whizz some gas into it. It’ll taste just as good as any fancy Italian fizz that’s spent months on a container ship.
so why DO we still buy bottled water?
Water companies use clever tactics to persuade their customers to part with their cash. According to Western Sydney University’s Professor Gay Hawkins, they often use the word ‘purity’ in their ad campaigns.
“Even though the bottled water markets don’t explicitly criticise tap water, they undermine it by creating a new set of values around water in bottles,” she said. Marketing often targets fitness-conscious females.
Meanwhile, a survey in Queensland found that 35 per cent of people say they prefer bottled water when asked. But in blind tastings, they can’t tell the difference.
The word ‘spring water’ also attracts people, even though it doesn’t make the water any more or less healthy, or improve taste. That’s because bottled water is still processed in huge industrial plants, and many companies refuse to disclose where their springs actually are.
There’s information on how you can get involved in Keep Australia Beautiful Week. But the easiest first step is to say goodbye to that plastic bottle from the servo!
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