Fossil fuel availability is shrinking. Drinkable water isn’t far behind. Abuse of these combined resources could be measurably reduced by eliminating unnecessary bottled water. Consider this:

Pepsi owns 13% of the bottled water market in the U.S. Coke owns another 11%. Both are purified municipal water. That means 24% of the bottled water sold is tap water repackaged and shipped all over the country. Would bottled water leave a bad taste in your mouth if the label revealed how much fossil fuel you were using to quench your thirst?

Plastic is made primarily (70 percent) from domestic natural gas. “More than 90 percent of the environmental impacts from a plastic bottle happen before the consumer opens it,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Oil for plastic, oil for shipping, oil for refrigeration -- and in the end, most of the effort goes to landfills,” summarizes Bill Marsh in a New York Times article.

The average American purchased over 28 gallons of bottled water in 2007. Over 80 percent had access to a plastics recycling program. While more than 2.3 billion pounds of plastic bottles were recycled, another 9.2 billion pounds weren’t. The amount of plastic bottles recycled in the U.S. has grown every year since 1990, but the actual recycling rate remains steady at around 24 percent. That’s a lot of fossil fuel going to the landfill, not to mention the amount needed to haul it from source to consumer and then to the landfill.

Maybe all packaging should identify the invisible resources embedded in their contents. That may sound absurd, but only if you don’t want consumers to know the true resource costs of their habits.

The transformation toward sustainability focuses on the waste stream first. Beyond the obvious waste created by our lifestyle is the invisible waste embedded into those same actions. There are numerous alternatives. Portable water filters make tap water more palletable without the unjustifiable amount of waste. Consider the impact of similar common sense approaches to sustainability.

True sustainability focuses on natural systems and learning to work within them. That doesn’t imply pain or hardship. In this case, the solutions are convenient, inexpensive, efficient and easy. If simple innovations can eliminate all that plastic and fuel consumption, what’s next?