No More PET Bottles? Modeling on Single-Serving Water Bottles Future Usage and Environmental Effects

Abstract

Nowadays, there are increasing concerns on the protection of environment. Single-serving bottles, made by polyethylene terephthalate mainly, have caused great damages to the harmonious development of human beings, animals and environment. Hence, this paper measures the impacts of single-serving water bottles ban quantitively by constructing sets of models. This project uses AR(p) model to predict the single-serving water bottles usage in future. The result shows that restrictions or bans on single-serving bottles are essential for our earth’s future. There are two major impacts of water bottles: one is the positive impacts (including reducing environmental pollution, reducing energy cost); the other is the negative impacts (including more soft drinks, health cost, and construction cost). The substitution effect model developed by the authors illustrates the influences of the ban on soft drinks as well as tap water. Moreover, the model was applied in the cases of towns, cities and airport, the biggest difference of which is the population density. Due to the limits of tap water, residents in those area with low density are facing high costs to obtain pure water, which causes much bigger inconvenience comparatively. Besides, this paper builds multi-objective model to find the approximate purifier facilities density from the perspective of maximizing carbon dioxide emissions reduction and minimizing costs. The result shows reducing the substitution effect for soft drinks is a good choice of the optimal condition. Besides, enhancing the price of soft drinks is a better method to reduce the negative impacts of a ban on bottled water. In the end, some suggestions are given regarding the water bottle ban, including enhancing soft drinks’ price, advertising the negative impacts of PET bottles to public.