What is the carbon footprint of packaged drinking water per litre?
For bottled water the bottle usually matters most. Add PET preforms, caps, labels and shrink wrap by weight, then RO, ozonation and filling electricity, and delivery. Divide by litres filled. A 20 litre returnable jar reused many times carries far less packaging per litre.
Packaging
- PET preform per bottle: weigh it; lighter preforms cut the largest line.
- HDPE caps, labels and LDPE shrink film.
- 20 litre polycarbonate or PET jars: divide their footprint by the number of trips each jar makes before it is retired.
Plant energy
- Borewell pumps, RO membranes, UV and ozonation.
- Blow moulding if you blow your own bottles.
- Generator diesel.
Delivery
Water is heavy, so delivery emissions per litre are noticeable. Count truck diesel for your own fleet as Scope 1, and hired transport as Scope 3.
Worked example: water plant per litre (one month)
- Electricity: 50,000 kWh x 0.710 = 35,500 kg CO2
- Generator and delivery diesel: 2,500 litres x 2.68 = 6,700 kg CO2
- Litres filled: 2,000,000
- Plant total: 42,200 / 2,000,000 = 0.021 kg CO2 per litre
- Add PET, caps, labels and film for the full figure
Inputs are illustrative; use your own bills and production records.
What Senseible does here
Senseible reads the plant's electricity bills (CEA grid factor 0.710 kg CO2 per kWh, CO2 Baseline Database version 21.0) and fuel invoices (IPCC 2006 defaults) into a fingerprinted Scope 1 and 2 record, the plant-level input to a per-unit figure. Bought-in materials go to the supplier evidence trail; product reports are self-declared drafts.
Sources: GHG Protocol Product Standard, ISO 14067:2018, Carbon footprint of products (iso.org), IPCC 2006 Guidelines, Volume 2 Energy (fuel defaults), CEA CO2 Baseline Database, version 21.0
Last reviewed 2026-10-20.