When I was a kid there was no such thing as bottled water. Nobody would buy a bottle of water. I recall when it first came out and thinking about how ridiculous it was – who would spend money on water?
Somewhere people got the idea that drinking tap water is bad for you. So Coca-Cola and Pepsi took tap water from Detroit and filtered it and sell it to you at a crazy mark-up (Dasani and AquaFina).
Many people want to drink water because it’s a lot better for you than sugar drinks – so we buy bottled water for convenience.
But a bottle of water takes 2000 times as much energy to create (plastic, trucking, handling) than tap water. And the bottle is an environmental liability forever. People may drink up to eight 12-ounce containers of fluids a day on average. Imagine that – for one of 8 billion people on earth to satiate themselves for a couple hours, a plastic bottle is produced and discarded on the earth. That is going to cause a huge problem. There is an island of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas! This is not good!
If you “recycle” your plastic water bottles it will take a lot more energy still.
So, get a water filter (I use a Brita-style pitcher) and metal or glass water bottle and fill them up at home for free, and use them at work, and in your car and everywhere else. When I go on a plane trip now, on my packing checklist is an empty water bottle. I go through security and then fill it up at bottle refill stations they have in airports now.
Let’s stop the plastic bottle madness.
You in?
I’m in.