Bottled Water written 4 years ago

It turns out that people in the developed world — that is the people with safe, clean water, delivered straight to their houses — are the people leading soaring sales of bottled water. I find it crazy that people would rather drink something potentially shipped from thousands of miles away, rather than something that comes straight from a tap in the kitchen.

Some might claim it tastes funny, and some people even claim the convenience of bottled water makes it worthwhile. Consider the people that have to walk miles for water, or the people that drink bottled water because it’s the only option. All of a sudden makes keeping a pitcher full of water in the fridge seem like a trivial task eh?

The main thing that angers me about bottled water is the sheer cost of it. Not only in monetary value, in that it’s over 1000 times more expensive than the stuff out of your tap, but the environmental costs.

Consider that bottles of evian are shipped all across the world, the environmental costs of the millions of litres of oil used to move the stuff is enough to make your eyes water. 25% of bottled water sold is imported across country boundaries. Apparently, a Helsinki company shipped 1.4 million bottles of Finnish tap water 4,300 kilometres (2,700 miles) to Saudi Arabia.

Then there’s the PET plastics used to make the bottles. The Bottled Water industry asserts that PET bottles can be re-used over 100 times, but are they? I read on the side of a water bottle a while back “Do not re-use this bottle”, literal insanity. The bottles can be efficiently recycled (more so than glass or aluminium), but still 86% of the water bottles used in the US get put in the rubbish — to be incinerated or to lie in land fills.

Any health benefits due to drinking bottled water are also strongly debated.

Many people will remember the Calamities made by Coca-Cola with its Dasani water brand. In order to comply with the (stricter) UK guidelines, the water created by Dasani was not only poisonous, but also a carcinogenic, due to high levels of bromate.

Some even claim that, as with much in the modern world, that drinking purer, cleaner water is leading to a more susceptible human race, as immune systems are never properly developed to deal with impurities found in tap water.

Globally, $100 billion is spent on bottled water per year. Whereas the UN have said that in order to halve the number of people who lack reliable and lasting access to safe drinking water by the year 2015 would require only $30 billion per year.

Sources

• Bottled Water: Nectar of the Frauds?
• What’s in your water?

I’m not opposed to grabbing a bottle of water to drink whilst you’re out and about — it’s the purchasing of 24 packs of 2 litre bottles of water that gets to me.

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