People get used to drink bottled water in account of it could be purchased in stores at any place, save troubles of inconvenience of drinking water.
It seems that bottled water are airtight and very clean, but do you know that some plastic bottles that are too transparent may be filled with a transparent agent containing bisphenol A, which will have adverse effects on pregnant women and children. In addition, the bottles of drinking water should not have color. Some color bottles may contain some heavy metal raw materials, which will also affect the health of the drinkers after being dissolved in the water.
In the process of making bottles, compounds containing antimony will be used as catalysts. With the formation of plastic bottles, antimony also enters the plastic. Plastic bottles may continuously dissolve the heavy metal element-antimony into the water in the bottles, which may be harmful to health if accumulated in the body for a long time. The content of antimony in natural groundwater is one trillionth, while that of bottled water just out of the factory is 160 trillionth on average. The longer the time is, the more antimony in the plastic bottle dissolves in the water. Three months after leaving the factory, the content of antimony in bottled water has doubled. However, most bottled water packages on the market now have a shelf life of 24 months. In addition, the higher the temperature, the greater the amount of antimony dissolved in the water, and people's demand for bottled water is high in summer. Although very small amounts of antimony do not cause illness, large amounts can cause vomiting and can even be fatal.
Bottled water is not equal to mineral water. The water of one or two yuan on the market is only packaged drinking water. Mineral water is a kind of natural or artificially exposed unpolluted underground mineral water, which contains a certain amount of mineral salt, trace elements or carbon dioxide gas, minerals and limited indicators specified by national standards. The packaging drinking water is generally processed into pure water with urban tap water as the water source, and then made with mineral food additives.
Nick Reeves, executive chairman of the water and Environmental Management Association, also said the pollution of bottled water to the environment should not be ignored. Around the world, 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to make plastic bottles every year. Most of the raw materials for these plastic bottles are extracted from oil. In the United States alone, 1.5 million barrels of oil are consumed to make these plastic bottles, which can be used for 100000 vehicles for one year. 86% of plastic water bottles end up being garbage, which takes 400 to 1000 years to degrade. These plastic wastes will produce toxic gases and ashes containing heavy metals when they are burned.
Drinking bottled water is not a long-term plan. Out of the concern of health and environmental protection, it's better to take a bottle, drinking boiled tap water or using water filter system.
