Bottled Water

How much water does it take to fill a liter of bottled water?

Interesting question...haha I thought perhaps around 1.5-2L but it turns out it takes around 3.

Picking on the nitty-gritties - 1 liter goes inside the bottle and 2 liters are needed in the production process-according to a 2006 estimate by the California-based Pacific Institute.

They even calculated the amount of oil needed to fill the bottles with water, transport them, chill them, and dispose of or recycle them - 250 ml per bottle.

Read more at:Bottled Water and Energy

Greenhouse Emissions

The debate rages on...but what is surprising is the heat (literally) that we are facing from the rest of the world over it. And I am unhappy with the way our government is trying to handle it - we keep trying to make everyone happy at the cost of our own genuine needs.

Sure global warming might be a problem and sure CO2 and other green house gas emissions need to be controlled, but why bully us?

And our strategy to tag with China doesn't make sense to me either? We are a lot better than them already - 4 times better almost.

Let us start with some facts, below is the share of CO2 emissions in %:

china - 21.5 %

United States - 20.2 %

European Union - 13.8 %

Russia - 5.5 %

India - 5.3 %

China and US together account for 40%. EU the most vocal when it comes to cutting emissions is not that far behind. We on the other hand are accounting for 5% (and rising of course).

Considering our 1.15 billion population (it should be around that by now), there is no way that we can reduce these levels.

What is needed is massive funding by the rich nations in alternate energy options - a) to developing nations like ours so that they can make an early shift and b) to develop these technologies to be affordable for other emerging countries.

Its really that simple...there is no way a government can justify spending billions to produce power at over 4 times the coal based plants when funds are needed for other sectors (health and education for example).

The country that can make the quickest impact on world CO2 (and the other more potent green house gases) levels is the US - the pressure should really be on them but they are already busy undermining the Copenhagen summit in December.

We should aim for:

a) maintaining the principles agreed during the Kyoto summit.

b) make US cut emissions

c) allow for another 5% increase for India - which is justified - 17% population should be allowed to make up for 10% global energy needs.

d) Increase the green cover across the globe...the impact may not be more than 10%, but it will be cost effective

and we need to come up with even more/better ideas.

Of course there are other aspects to it that go beyond basic energy needs...environment protection for example, where we are appalling and can not hide behind any excuses...we need to answer a lot for the state of our rivers, wild life and forest cover.

Similarly, there is no reason not to be more stringent with our emission norms...we should not only set the norms at par with European nations but also enforce it...who said its going to be easy :)