Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Brief note of thanks


To all Americans, from the makers of bottled water:

"Thank you. Despite having drinking water as safe as anyone's, we convinced you it could be better out of a plastic bottle. We sold it to you and you bought it, and for that we express our appreciation from the very bottoms of our bottom lines."

Facts:
  • For every liter of bottled water that makes it to super market shelves, three liters of water were sacrificed to manufacture it.
  • Seventeen million barrels of oil per year are used to make bottled water. (This does not include shipment to its final marketing destinations.)
  • A gallon of U.S. tap water costs less than a penny. (Note: Americans willingly pay up to $10/gallon for bottled water and bitch and moan when paying $3.00/gallon of gas.)
  • Globally, 2.7 million tons of plastic are used each year in water bottles.
Charles Fishman in his article entitled "Message in a Bottle" in Fast Company magazine describes a plastic bottle of water "in a store's cooler as the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health."

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4 comments:

Fran said...

I had heard about this a while ago & invested in a bunch of Nalgene reusable water bottles. What I like about them is you can fill them half up, freeze them & then top them off w more water & have water that stays cold for a good long time.
A lot of the companies selling bottled water have pristine nature photos, but the content is tap water. No remote snowy glacier involved!
I understand Disani is supposed to put, somewhere on the label that it is in fact tap water... the question is just how small a font size can they make it?
The flip side is some places DO have bad tasting, or cloudy water. If you are on the road, it is nice to have an option of getting water instead of sugary stuff with other chemicals. But for the most part, we can avoid all the extra waste & fuel used to provide bottled water.

Dada said...

I agree, Fran. There are instances where bottled water is convenient or reassuring. The rest of the time, it's just a waste of resources.

Thanks for the Nalgene reusable bottles. I'll definitely check them out. (And I was wondering what to get the Mrs. for Xmas! ~grin) TY!)

Speaking of water, hope you're high and dry up there. I've been seeing alarming images from the PacNW.

Fran said...

We did get some crazy high winds, rain was blowing every which way, the wind chimes were clanking like crazy & we had to lock the screen door to make it stop slamming about. Other than that, there were no power outages or downed trees in my immediate area. Whew!

The cheap imitation reusable water bottles will spilt/crack when you freeze them. But I found a sport store (Bimart) that had them for $2 bucks each- the big 32 ounce size. (I am under Doctors orders to drink water like crazy). The ones I bought said on the tag they could be frozen.

D.K. Raed said...

Many places I've lived have had bad tasting water, chloriney or punky or muddy. We installed a Reverse Osmosis system under the sink in our last house ... problem solved! Did the same in this house, even though the water here didn't taste as awful, because we are now hooked on the R.O. removing so many impurities. And around here in the summer, boy-oh-boy, freezing some of that water & taking it with you in venturing outside, is a necessity!

But I take your point seriously about the insanity of promoting something that is produced so inefficiently. The same could be said about eating beef, cow ranching using so much more resources than equivalent agriculture. And don't even THINK about pork. There's a huge ham farm a few hundred miles from us that makes me sick to think about.