Barges travel thousands of miles across oceans to transport one of the planet’s heaviest yet most precious commodities — clean, drinking water. Transportation professionals are not carrying them in massive bins. Instead, the supplies are prepackaged in plastic, boxed and put on pallets to reach consumer markets. Shipping bottled water requires copious energy, but is it even necessary, given its environmental impact?

Before Shipping Bottled Water
Despite accessible filters and trendy reusable bottles, the bottled water industry has seemingly infinite staying power. Projections suggest it could be worth $380.5 billion by 2029, which is a 6.79% CAGR in a decade. Big names, like Nestle, PepsiCo and Danone, are the most prominent hands in the escalating growth. This makes them and other major distributors responsible for the environmental impact.

The emissions from shipping must include climate considerations from production. It is the only way to obtain the full picture of shipping bottled water. Extracting it from environments leaves communities and biodiversity that need it without access.

This develops into water rights issues, as social equity is a facet of sustainable ideals and development goals. Environmental activists promote available water as a human right, and commodifying it and shipping it worldwide to damage the planet further is contrarian to all eco-conscious goals. Even if companies do not sap reservoirs dry, the ecological impact remains as it takes between 3.3 and 4.1 litres of water to make one litre of bottled water for shipment. The damage could disrupt flow or force reproductive changes in aquatic ecosystems.

Additionally, the materials required for plastic deplete habitats. Crafting the perfect bottle design generates waste and often uses fossil fuels. The impact from these internal operations is Scope 1 emissions.

Transporting Bottled Water
Weighing a fuel-intensive ship down with bottled water to travel thousands of miles leaves its mark on the planet and its oceans. Heavy cargo forces all forms of transportation to use more fuel than they would otherwise.

This includes aircrafts, trains and medium- and heavy-duty vehicles responsible for the final stretches of the journey. However, some ocean freight managers attempt to become more fuel-efficient by reintroducing sails and advocating for improved regulations.

The heft adds more pressure, but the fuel needed to ship bottled water is already monumental, given the distance. Fuel use and its pollution hurts biodiversity in all environments. European transportation emissions rose 8.6% in 2021, with increases over 2.7% moving forward. Shippers do not always maintain emissions regulations, letting dangerous sulphur and nitrogen dioxide into the air and the residuals falling into the ocean.

Another concern is ballast water management. Vessels justify its presence by asserting it is crucial for boat stability, but reserves often contain invasive species. These bio-invasions have long-lasting impacts, such as zebra mussels lengthening the growth cycles of freshwater fish. It is antithetical for bottled water operations to attempt to ship treated products on a boat polluting and infecting the ocean in its route.

The excessive packaging does not always make it to its destination. Sometimes it even degrades in transit because of poor temperature control. Transporting bottled water is susceptible to littering if bottles and cases are not secure. They could even dispose of poor quality product when reaching their destination. Adequate oversight alongside checks and balances before departure could ensure this does not happen.

After Delivery
Client and consumer-oriented emissions fall within the Scope 3 category, and bottled water companies do not take as much ownership as they should for reducing this impact. Bottled water makers and shippers must support customers in finding eco-friendly, ethical ways to dispose of plastic. The infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a blemish caused by players like the bottled water shipping industry.

The recycling industry’s infrastructure needs to be more expansive and diverse. Any one shipment of bottled water could contain hundreds of shape and colour variants, making each unit questionably recyclable depending on the area’s availability. This creates customer and corporate complacency, as plastic waste, chemicals and adhesives taint wildlife and their habitats.

Countless microplastics are typically found in water bottles regardless of their label. Companies work hard to use processes like reverse osmosis and vapour compression distillation to make products as clean as possible. However, chemical leaching could influence the purest products.

Shipping companies and manufacturers do not have strict responsibilities to offset, document or lower emissions. These voluntary commitments must become mandatory for the sector’s emissions to be reduced in the long term. However, legislative action like the recent revisions to the EU Waste Shipment Regulation will ban plastic waste shipments, which likely include significant amounts of water bottles. This aspect of water bottle shipping is often overlooked, but transportation waste destined for landfills is another reason the carbon footprint is so high.

Beyond the Bottle
Water dispersal options exist without the adverse impact of transporting bottled water. Examples include filters, which help sanitation efforts and keep reserves in local spaces. Water scarcity is an ever-growing problem because of the ballooning bottled water sector, among numerous other influences. However, removing this negative could yield significant positives for fixing the world’s future relationships with water.

 
Emily Newton