Economics and Environmental Hazards Essay

In the 21st century, global warming, littering, eat, and temperature rises shake off been the subject of focus for umteen scientists. While examining the many causes of global warming, scientists found fossil fuel emissions and CO2 emissions to be a major cause. Although Earth is known as the Blue Planet for its vast piddle sources, oftentimes of that pee is salt weewee. Only 3% of the Earth is fresh pee, and 70% of that is in glacial ice, unreachable by most. Thus, only 0. 5% of the Earth is do of usable fresh pee. This limited amount of pee is unsuitable for the grounds expanding population.Much of this peeing, however, can be easily conserved by chemise from bottled water to tap water. Through using tap water and conserving plastic, we can save 27 times the amount of water we reliablely are thriftiness, and use water sources wisely so as to not run out. Literature Review In the 1930s, the subjects of global warming, water, and lack of resources for fossil fuels beca me concern for Americans. The New York Times ran their head start global warming article in 1929, when it first was considered a allegory. Now that global warming has become a major concern for citizenry, we realize how much we have wasted natures resources- especially water.Although 75% percent of the Earth is made up of water, less than 1% is drinkable and accessible by people. Countless blogs, websites, newspapers, and academic journals, such as the Journal of Dental Association (2003) and BioMed Central (2009), describe how our thoughtless actions have led to water depletion. Through processing, we waste 26 liters of water to get 1 liter of bottled water. The bottles are made in China using crude oil and transported thousands of miles on oil-eating machines, causing the ozone horizontal surface to melt.There are now seldom disputes to the existence of ozone depletion, and media uses print and internet to support the cutting down on bottled water. Bottled Water Economics and Environmental Hazards. Thousands of old age ago, water was a gift from the gods, to be saved and cherished. It allowed ancient civilizations to bring about into structured societies, and gave people the ability to survive on domesticating animals and growing plants. Today, in the ripe world, water is often taken for granted, and has become a daily thing of our lives.We see water fountains everywhere, and bottled water can be purchased in bulk. However, at the current rate we are using water, freshwater amounts are likely to decimate. This gift from the gods has brought environmental harm to the world and wasted the money of thousands of people. Thus, in order to encourage the environment and save our own money, we must make good choices and switch from excessively using bottled water to using tap water. One of the top reasons people often buy bottled water is because of the thingamajig it provides (Ferrier, 2001, pp.118-119). Easy life is what the entire economy runs on, as we have seen from the declining economy. As income lessens, people are reverting rachis to an older lifestyle of doing things themselves instead of purchasing services and goods. While bottled water may taste better because of chemicals that companies add in, it also costs significantly much. A New York Times reporter calculated that eight glasses of New York City tap water were about 49 cents a year, plainly 8 glasses of bottled water would be 2,900 times more expensive- as much as $1,400 per year.Because water is something that every household needs, it is reasonable to conclude that by switching to bottled water, families could cut their water expenses in half (Helm, 2008) and America as a whole could save. The high costs of purchasing bottled water are often overdue to the processing that bottled water must go through and the costs of shipping and plastic. Instead of drinking water from a local river or other water source, people choose to drink water shipped from Fiji, where extra charge is added for shipping. The plastic that is utilise to make the bottle also adds charge.A replacement for this kind of convenience is drinking from the bottles and then continuously refilling them to save your money and the environment. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 85% of water bottles in the United States end up in landfills (cited in Aslam, 2006). Unfortunately, plastic takes up to 1,000 years to decompose and the fuel emissions that delivery trucks emanate destroy the ozone layer. Even more smog and smoke is given off by the manufacturing plant, contributing to global warming, evaporation of our current freshwater supply, and melting/mixing of glacial freshwater and ocean water.About 70% of freshwater is in glacial ice, and as a result of temperatures rising, the freshwater melts, mixing in with saltwater and becoming undrinkable until further chemical processing. Another common myth about bottled water is that it is healthier. A study conducted b y University of Birmingham interrogationers found that The majority of participants believed that bottled water has some health benefits but that they were not necessarily significant or superior to the benefits provided by tap water (BioMed Central, 2009).The participants, users of the universitys sports center, stated that the health benefits of bottled water were negligible, and it was taste and convenience that truly motivated them to buy bottled water. Some research even suggests the opposite- that bottled water is less beneficial to health than tap water. While communities actively add in fluoride a cavity fighter- to the water supply, the majority of bottled water contains junior-grade to no fluoride (Rugg-Gunn, 2003). Many large water companies currently undergo processes such as distillation and/or osmosis both remove all fluoride from the water (American Dental Association, 2003).Since we now know that bottled water is not healthier than other water sources, we must re flect again on the numerous drawbacks of bottled water. Landfills continue to grow and grow, leading to larger emissions of ozone-depleting gases (Sarma, 2002). Birds and other small animals choke on plastic, mistaking it for food, and also die as a result. The ecosystem is dying as a result. The world works as a whole, a cycle, a circle. The consequences of our actions will always come back to bite us, or in the case of water, our posterity when they have low water supply.Conserving water today will benefit people later. In addition, as we become closer and closer to high UV ray exposure and losing our ozone layer, scientists are frantically trying to build labs, gather money, and conduct extensive research about how to conserve the environment and water. By not procrastinating, and saving plastic and water resources now, we will save great amounts of money. The exotic island of Fiji is known for its pure, fresh, crisp water, even to Americans who live thousands of miles away.A 16 ounce bottle of Fiji water currently costs from $1. 50 to $2. 50. At a rate like that, when we are at the edge of the Great Lakes and other vast water sources, but purchase water from the other side of the world, our money is being sold away to foreign countries. Most of 2. 7 million tons of plastic used for bottling and packaging come from China (Aslam, 2006). The result is a national economic breakdown, not only in the water industry, but in all industries, since people cannot cut down on the amount of water they need to drink.It takes 63 million gallons of oil per year to manufacture water bottles (Niman, 2007). That is not only more water than Fijians themselves drink that we are buying, but also 63 million extra gallons of oil and plastic that we toss away. Ironically, one third of Fijians are in destitution and lack the amount of water they need. Because one liter of bottled water uses 26 liters of water, one kilogram of fossil fuel, and one pound of CO2 (Thangham, 2007), lit tle is left for the Fijians in destitute. This is true for not only Fiji waters, but all waters in the world.In 2007, Fiji, one of the worlds most favourite drinking water sources, became the first bottled water company to release its carbon footprint -85,396 metric tons of CO2eq (Corporate Social Responsibility, 2008). Imagine the carbon footprint essential for the world, or even the United States. Perhaps American water companies have not released their carbon footprints because of how overwhelmingly large they are. If we could cut down on how much bottled and imported water we drank, we could preserve a large amount of water for the future.