DRINK OIL?

I wouldn't.

Take any typical plastic bottle, fill it one fourth with crude oil. Look at it. This is what the actual bottle is made of, plus packaging and transport.

The bottle itself is essentially refined oil with chemicals added to it, melted and molded in any number of attractive shapes and colors, but there is no escaping the fact that it is basically a handful of oil. And THEN it gets transported from the factory, to the store where you just DROVE to go buy it, or from the suppliers warehouse to your gym, school, hospital... 60 million of these are thrown away every year, not recycled.

That's over 100,000 bottles thrown away PER MINUTE in this country alone.

The situation regarding garbage is stressing Earth's ability to sustain life.
See NONEEDCAMPAIGN.org to learn more about this.

Being careful about what you buy is part of the solution, but when it comes to the things you are in contact with most often and the foods you ingest, plastic water bottles are a scary gamble.

The Pacific Institute estimates that in 2006:

• Producing the bottles for American consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation
• Bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide
• It took 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water

Energy Required to Make PET Plastic

According to the plastics manufacturing industry, it takes around 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-liter plastic bottle, cap, and packaging. Making enough plastic to bottle 31.2 billion liters of water required more than 106 billion megajoules of energy. Because a barrel of oil contains around 6 thousand megajoules, the Pacific Institute estimates that the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil were needed to produce these plastic bottles.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Consumption of Bottled Water

The manufacture of every ton of PET produces around 3 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). Bottling water thus created more than 2.5 million tons of CO2 in 2006.

http://www.pacinst.org/topics/water_and_sustainability/bottled_water/bottled_water_and_energy.html

Plastic Never Dies

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP's) represent a major and severe long term threat to the health of all living species. UNEP ( United Nations Environment Program) has a wealth of information on this issue but the pdf available here is a good start.
http://chm.pops.int/Portals/0/Repository/CHM-general/UNEP-POPS-CHM-GUID-RIDDING.English.PDF

Residue from pesticides floating in the air, synthetic food additives, fire retardent in your clothing and furniture, and chemicals that went into the plastic bottle you drink water from, the plastic lining in every can of food, soft drink, and children's juice boxes are now in your body.

Every human on Earth is now partly synthetic.

We have GOT to get a handle on this because the results are obviously deadly. POP's and other substances accumulate in your fatty tissue, enter the bloodstream, get into your brain, pass through mother's milk to the newborn children of the world and have known effects, but what's going to be worse are the unknown consequences of this toxic soup.

How can you help? What simple things could make a big difference?

Well... 2 plastic bottles of water per day could cost six dollars easily (you would even get small bottles at that) and the water inside has lower standards than water from your tap!

Behind the pristine mountains and fluffy cloud labels is usually a faucet from the city on full blast. In India, Coca Cola Inc. was forced to change their label when they lost a lawsuit claiming false advertisement and misrepresentation of those pretty vistas.

There are a couple of really nice glass bottles with overpriced water but none are as inert, functional and portable as a steel bottle.

Drinking oil is dangerous. Just look at the back of any regular auto oil container, what does it say? "Prolonged contact may cause cancer." So, why in the world would you place precious water into a container that leaches oily carcinogens into it while sitting in your car in the sun, or while you finish a round of tennis?

 

We will be adding more links and actions soon, as well as working hard to form a coalition against the horiffic consequences of oily cheapness in our diet.

 

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-Plastic4nov02.htm

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Plasticizers/Out-Of-Diet-PG5nov03.htm