Julie is typical twenty-five year-old Hispanic woman that grew up in a household where drinking water from the tap was frowned upon. Now, as an adult, Julie drinks about five water bottles per day, which adds up to 150 water bottles a month, or a grand total of 1,800 water bottles per year. Her water bottle of choice – Dasani Purified Water – costs an average of $4.99 per twenty-four pack, or around $0.20 per bottle, at her local Wal-Mart. This means that Julie, by herself, annually consumes around 74 twenty-four packs of bottled water. In other words, she spends $369.26 on drinking bottled water every year1. In terms of waste, Julie does not recycle the bottles that she uses; she throws them away with the rest of her trash. Each bottle of water she drinks from contributes about 12.7 grams of trash. It does not sound like much on its own, but that accumulates to fifty pounds of plastic material waste every year. If Julie were to continue …show more content…
Although Julie drinks slightly more water than the average person, amongst other minorities she is not alone in her habitude. Interestingly, Hispanic and Black Americans spend an average of twenty dollars a month on bottled water, while white families only spend an average of twelve dollars a month on bottled water (Melnick 2011). This is likely a result of Hispanic and Black parents being three times more likely to hydrate their children with bottled water compared with white parents (Arumugam 2011). These differences in numbers stem from the fear and distrust that Hispanics and Black people have towards their tap water. This lack of trust in tap water is not entirely uncalled for, but it is definitely carried to an excess. Unsurprisingly, it is the bottled water industry themselves that have an important role in all of this. This topic alone merits its own analyzation, but I will only briefly cover it near the