Posted by Benjamin on: 03.30.2008 /
My hometown city of Seattle recently decided to stop buying bottled water, which is probably somewhat of a bane for the company that sold it to them, for $58,000 a year. Seattle mayor Greg Nickles said
“When you add up the tremendous environmental costs of disposable plastic bottles clogging our landfills, the better choice is crystal clear.”
How many of the 2 million plastic beverage bottles (the number used in the U.S. every five minutes) in this artwork are water bottles? You can see a zoom in on this image here and here .
Do you drink bottled water? I have a good friend from Australia who only drinks bottled water because she claims tap water isn’t safe. Whenever she visits, she simply won’t drink the tap water, and buys a lot of bottled water. I can understand this. Earlier this month, for instance, an Associated Press investigation found trace amounts of prescription and over the counter drugs in the water supplies of 41 million Americans in 24 major cities.
On the other hand, my friend Byron, also from Australia, argues the other direction
Bottled water makes no sense. Tap water is just as safe (if not safer), comes in at about 1/2400th of the price, uses very little energy and produces very little pollution. Bottled water costs about as much for a bottle as you spend on drinking tap water for a year
At a slightly different level of analysis, the BBC reports
The world’s supply of fresh water is running out. Already one person in five has no access to safe drinking water.
Some questions that occur to me:
Your thoughts?
Leave a Reply
Comment by: Byron Smith
1 03/31/08 4:57 AM | Comment Link |Is it … poor stewardship to buy bottled water?
Generally, I’d say yes, since it discourages quality tap water and generates massive amounts of unnecessary waste. Even though some percentage of plastic bottles will be recycled, the majority still end up as landfill.
Is it totally unfair for me to have unlimited safe drinking and bathing and washing water while over a billion people don’t?
It is not a bad thing that we have access to clean drinking water. It is a bad thing that over a billion people do not. It is also a bad thing that many with access to water consider their supply to be “unlimited”. It is not.
Comment by: Jay
2 03/31/08 5:48 AM | Comment Link |I live in Canada right in between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Heres a fact which you may find hard to believe but in Ontario we have over 200,000 fresh water lakes yes over 200,000 check it out on the web. People around here (almost 50%) in our region use bottled water exclusively for their drinking water. And do you want to know the main reason..Convenience they say, its just easier to grab a bottle from the fridge and go, instead of if needed filtering it and filling a bottle. We here in Canada think our fresh water is unlimited and use it accordingly, its unbelievable we can have such a mentality but one day im sure it will come back to bite us if we dont soon wise up to what we have and how we should be protecting it.
Is it poor stewardship? Yes 100%
Is it unfair..IMO no you are fortunate to live where you do, just realize it and do your part to be a good steward.
If anyone is interested and has 5$ to spare go over to thirst relief .org and make a donation, that 5$ will help save a life, not just for a day, a month or year but for many years to come. TTFN
Comment by: Benjamin
3 03/31/08 9:16 AM | Comment Link |Jay, thank you for the link. I hyperlinked it for you =)
I think I’m kind of in the same boat as you–we have *so* much fresh water here in western Washington. Everything is always unbelievably green. It’s hard for me to imagine lack of water in general.
But with 200,000 fresh water lakes–it must be beautiful!
It’s hard, I think, for me to get my head around someone dying every 15 second from lack of clean drinking water when we are surrounded by so much of it here in North America.
Comment by: David H
4 03/31/08 10:55 AM | Comment Link |The irony is that bottled water may be simply tap water. In the early ’90s I was freelancing for a Philadelphia business magazine while also working at a newspaper. I wrote about one of the first US water utilities to go into the bottled water business. The company in question was one of the primary water suppliers for the taps of Philadelphia city and some surrounding suburbs. They had noticed how hot bottled water was becoming and figured they could present a nice return to shareholders by venturing into this burgeoning business — and they were right. Funny thing was nothing on the bottles suggested to people that they could literally get the same water from their taps. They just called it spring water, because most of the water came from some artesian wells.
I have found bottled water useful when in some third world countries, but otherwise tend to avoid it. I installed a water filter on my well (mostly to eliminate sulfur smell, but also because we are surrounded by working farms that may be putting pesticides and fertilizers into the water table). I prefer to put that in bottles for myself and the kids. It really does taste good and I know exactly what’s in it. Also, the wide-mouth bottles are easy to wash.
BTW, the only way to be 100 percent sure you are drinking safe water is to distill. Go out and buy some distilled water. Tastes like crap. Un-oxygenated plain water is not very appetizing.
I have been trying to make the people at my newspaper aware of the pending water crisis since reading an article about a Mexican fishing town on the Colorado River delta (Gulf of California). The small town had been on the banks of the delta since its inception. But the western building boom of the 1990s, coupled with a severe long-term drought in the same region, had essentially dried the river by the time it reached this village. When the article was written, what was left of the “river” was more than three miles away and that wasn’t fresh water because the lack of flow had allowed saltwater intrusion far beyond that point. The Mexican government was forced to truck in fresh water to a village that had formerly had a bountiful source right outside people’s doors. Most damning, the cost for a month of trucked water for a single village family was more than some developers in Nevada and Arizona were paying for perpetual water rights that supplied massive golf courses and entire subdivisions.
As for the mighty Colorado River, it basically doesn’t reach Mexico anymore. The delta is about 5 percent of its original size. The environmental damage is essentially irreparable. Yet most water watchers agree that the population and agriculture needs that led to that water being siphoned away have already far exceeded what can be prudently supplied. In other words, there still isn’t enough water for all of the homes in Las Vegas and Phoenix nor all of the cattle in-between.
It is difficult to fight such massive and callous stupidity. The UN has taken up the issue, but they are a rather slow and inefficient organization, hindered even more when their projects champion predominantly third world needs against the mindless wants of certain over-privileged super-powers. Canada also appears to give the health of the Great Lakes far more priority than does the US. But not enough. Talk has started about a looming problem with Lake Superior, the world’s third largest (by volume) body of fresh water. Water levels are falling because of drought, global warming, population growth and farming needs (ethanol has led to far greater corn production in the region, corn requires up to 5 times the water of crops such as wheat). Some are pointing to the Aral Sea disaster as a possible eventual outcome. Once the world’s fourth-largest freshwater lake, the Aral has all but disappeared with catastrophic environmental and economic results. Last summer brought similar dire predictions from many quarters of the US.
Even closer to my home, a few years ago the Delaware River was dangerously low, nearly bringing the salt line to the intakes for some Philadelphia water suppliers. (My wife worked for the world’s largest Vitamin C maker at that time. In Belvidere, NJ, Hoffman-LaRoche found their fermentation tanks mysteriously stopped producing. After months of study the culprit was found to be E. Coli bacteria. They fed the tanks directly from the river, which also happened to be dumping ground for treated effluent from countless upstream sewage plants. Falling water levels allowed E. Coli to reach high enough levels they compromised LaRoche’s fermentation process. However, further downstream, where greater population made for more sewage effluent going into the Delaware, people kept drinking the water.) Last year the Susquehanna hit a record low. But a real disaster may be the only thing that wakes up Americans to our ridiculous waste. So, IMHO it is better to give money to Thirst Relief or similar organizations than to try and change US minds about what is happening here. The latter requires great effort and yields almost no results. The former requires little investment and is an immediate and life-changing benefit.
As for bottled water: not just poor stewardship, but really dumb. Despite recent efforts there is still little regulation of the US water industry. The labels don’t say what else may be in that water. Take the money spent there and buy a Brita or similar filter for your tap with a couple of reusable bottles (Nalgene very popular these days). And, as with so many other issues, talk about them with others when opportunity allows. It may get you labeled a little bit whack, but someone may actually listen.
Comment by: Julie Clawson
5 03/31/08 6:02 PM | Comment Link |Yes, quite often bottled water is just tap water for which they charge the same price per gallon as for gas.
But David I would have to recommend using stainless steel water bottles as opposed to Nalgene which are made from polycarbonate plastic which leach BPA and are being banned in some areas.
Comment by: Staci
6 03/31/08 6:17 PM | Comment Link |Once again we seem to have taken something useful in moderation and decided to use it to excess. Water bottles can be very useful under particular circumstances. I have found that, at least in the US, a filter on the home tap and the refrigerator water tap work very well. (Don’t forget to change the filters regularly.)
May I suggest a compromise when your Austrailian friend visits and you want to be a good host and accomodate her wishes? Purchase gallon and/or what I call “keg” sized water bottles. Some of these can even be refilled at major grocery stores. Larger quantities in the same bottle mean less overall plastic or glass is used. (Even better if you get the refillable kind.) That way your guest feels comfortable and you can too.
FYI, Oregon has decided to add water bottles to its Bottle Bill, so in Jan. 2009 there will be a deposit on water bottles too. This has improved recycling for other beverage containers, so that is a positive step. Though with the energy/fuel required to produce and distribute and then recycle bottles, reducing use is much better.
Comment by: David H
7 03/31/08 6:55 PM | Comment Link |Yes, Nalgene possibly not good. People at work now use the stainless bottles. I tend to go with non-polycarbonate plastic because of my bicycling. But now I should probably think about that.
Comment by: Benjamin
8 03/31/08 9:59 PM | Comment Link |I fear I’m totally ignorant. What’s BPA?
Comment by: Benjamin
9 03/31/08 10:00 PM | Comment Link |Staci
Thank you. That’s a great idea. I should check with her to see if that would work, next time she’s coming over. =)
Comment by: Elaine
10 03/31/08 10:30 PM | Comment Link |David - when you mention Lake Superior is shrinking - it brings up memories from my childhood - in the late fifties/early sixties - the Weekly Reader did a whole edition on drought and predicted the Great Lakes drying up…I wish I had saved that…but it impressed me enough that the memory stuck with me all these years - and here we are talking about “water” shortages. Too bad I don’t have a photographic memory to recall what it said the cause was. Hmmmm. I do wonder what the scientist saw then that led them to predict this could happen in the next 100 years.