There are parts of the world without drinking water, no good tap water or any water on tap, and we import bottled water over here when we have incredibly good, pure tap water (I’m in England)… where’s the sense in that? Totally unbalanced and we should be focussing on getting drinking water to places that need it.

According to an article by the Times of London, a Swedish study calculated bottled water as having an environmental impact of 90 to 1,000 times higher than tap water.. or even higher…!!

The biggest users apparently are France (141 litres/person/year), Mexico (169ltrs/p/y) and Italy (184ltrs/p/y)- Britons drink 37ltrs/p/y (source- The Independent).

Tap water is distributed through an energy efficient infrastructure.
The plastic bottles used for water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET)- very bad- and even though the PET content is going down it’s still there, and only 10% of bottles get recycled (The Independent).

Bottled water in the UK averages 95p/litre; tap water £1 per 1,0000 litres. (The Independent).

In short it’s a terrible terrible environmental drain and the creation of *innumerable* bottles, plus the transport of them across the world using loads and loads of fuel, is something that should be changed.

There is a company that I found online who offer a recycling service for batteries- Zinc and Alkaline recycling are discussed here: http://www.envirogreen.co.uk/service_battery_recycling.shtml
–There’s loads and loads of information here. Quite a lot of reading about all aspects of battery recycling. I’ve had a read of this and it contains some very interesting information so I’d recommend taking a look.

Some of it is a bit confusing/overwhelming, but I think what they’re saying is that Zinc, Alkaline and Lead (like lead car batteries) batteries can be recycled in the UK.
Non-lead acid batteries can’t be re-processed in the UK because there are no facilities in this country. When these are collected for recycling, they’re sent to the continent for ’material recovery’. A concern here is that these plants will soon reach capacity and there will be stockpiles of batteries.

Have a look at the above link and also this one http://www.envirogreen.co.uk/service_battery_disposal.shtml and let me know if you interpret it differently. I’m not sure I totally understood the battery recycling information comprehensively.