The Portuguese Attitude to Drinking Tap Water

Bottled water consumption, which has more than doubled globally in the last six years, is a natural resource that is heavily taxing the world's ecosystem. Beverage marketing corporation figures show that consumption of bottled water in Portugal grew from 70 litres per person to 80 litres per person in the period from 1999 to 2004.

World statistics shows that only about 13% of plastic bottles are recycled. So nearly 8 out of every 10 plastic water bottles eventually end up in a landfill. What is more, the manufacturing process of creating bottled water created more than 2,5 million tons of carbon dioxide. It also takes more than 3 litres of water to create 1 litre of bottled water.

Having in mind that tap water is of a pretty good quality in Portugal the first suggestion would be just use tap water for drinking. If there are some doubts about the healthiness or the taste of tap water the possible way to deal with this problem would be starting to use domestic water cleaning appliances such as filters. The use of filters could substitute the consumption of bottled water. One water filter is enough for one month and it costs 2 euros.

With valuation question “How much money is your household willing to spend per month on tap water cleaning filters in order to lower the consumption of bottled water and the pollution they generate?­” and answers about the consumption of bottled water we are going to find out how much Portuguese people value the environment they live.

The population of our project was all Portuguese people, but we could not make sample according to statistical rules for some reasons. The biggest problem was our language. We are not able to make this project in Portuguese language, so it means that in our sample can not be involved non English speaking people. Secondly, we are limited in money and time. So our project was located in Braga, university of Minho. As we know from theory there are a lot of ways of delivering the questionnaire for people who are in the sample, but keeping in mind all reasons that we mentioned before the way of survey was to send questionnaire by email to all students and professors of university.

University of Minho has a student population of 16.000, out of which 1.900 are postgraduate students. The University has 1.200 teaching staff, of who 850 hold a PhD, and 600 administrative and technical staff1 (totally 17.200 people). We received 81 questionnaires back. It means that our sample is 81 people and it amounts only 0,471% of university population.…