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Bottled Water, Environmental Impact Cost
Have you ever contemplated bottled water and its environmental impact costs? Now's the time. Water quality is an issue in our diminishing water supplies and in the water coming from water treatment plants. And then you add the concerns about the chemicals that leach into water from plastic bottles and you have another health concern. Speaking of those plastic bottles -- they contribute to the landfills and increase our dependence on foreign oil. Consider the transportation involved in bottled water distribution, and you have an even bigger environmental impact and cost.
Drinking and cooking with bottled water is the height of fashion and the depth of environmental depravity. No product so chic has been so tasteless since the Nehru jacket suffered its widely acclaimed demise. When you see people sipping water from branded plastic or glass bottles, the socially correct thing to do is point them out to everyone nearby and laugh scornfully, like the little boy in the fable, "The Emperor's New Clothes". It's not mean, it's a kindness. Public humiliation often cures those whose common sense and decency are diseased.
Bottled water costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. In dollars, we're talking about $500 to $1000 per cubic meter of bottled water, compared to 50 cents per cubic meter for California's high-quality tap water. Completely unnecessary spending of that kind of money on the production, packaging, transportation, and storage of water is more than financial folly. It is unconscionably obscene selfishness in a world where over a billion people are without potable water of any kind.
The purported health and safety benefits of bottled water are dangerous delusions. Tap water quality control is centralized, independently monitored, and held to high standards. Bottled water producers are virtually unregulated and uninspected. Anyone with a mud hole to clean up can bottle and sell it to you, complete with microorganisms and industrial pollutants. Some have been caught merely bottling tap water, adding a few thousand percent to their costs, and reselling it as "pure, healthy mineral spring water".
Even honest producers of bottled water wreak environmental havoc. Local springs and aquifers are being depleted by "excessive withdrawals" of water for bottling, according to a report recently released by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute. Enormous electrical energy and three-fourths of "raw" tap water are wasted in osmosis-based purification of "ionized" water.
Bottled water does not taste better than most tap water. Never mind that your palate is more sophisticated than those of double-blind study participants who cannot tell bottled from tap water. If bottled water really tasted different, why would its producers have to add flavoring chemical, artificial flavoring?
The bottles themselves are environmental crimes. Most petroleum-based plastic used to bottle water is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, which requires less energy to recycle and does not release chlorine into the atmosphere when burned. But recycling rates have declined: about 23.1 percent of PET water bottles were recycled in the United States in 2005, compared with 39.7 percent 10 years earlier, according to Worldwatch.
For one's health, safety, and conscience, it is better to drink from the tap and donate bottled water money to organizations that dig wells in developing nations. Philanthropy has scientifically proven physical, mental, and longevity benefits; bottled water, none, zippo, nada.
It is not enough for you, alone, to give up bottled water. U. S. residents drank nearly 28.6 billion liters of bottled water in 2005; almost 100 liters per man, woman, and child! Nothing destroys deluded "smart" trends as expeditiously as setting a new trend founded in truth. The Nehru jacket passed away shortly after the Mayo Clinic reported that necks un-constricted by tight collars pass more blood to the brain, increasing productivity by 15 percent among necktie-free knowledge workers. A little knowledge can make bottled water aficionados feel as ridiculous and guilty as they are, prompting their return to the tap. Share this information with bottled-water faddists (the opinions expressed herein are optional), and help save the environment as well as a billion really thirsty people.
