• July 2007 TT Post
• August 2007 TT Post
• June 2016 Facebook Post

Bottled Water

Two of my ToledoTalk.com posts from 2007 along with a June 3, 2016 Facebook post by someone.

July 2007 TT Post

Bottled water bad for the environment

Feb 18, 2007 story : The real cost of bottled water

Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute. In contrast, San Francisco tap water is distributed through an existing zero-carbon infrastructure: plumbing and gravity. Our water generates clean energy on its way to our tap -- powering our streetcars, fire stations, the airport and schools.

More than 1 billion plastic water bottles end up in the California's trash each year, taking up valuable landfill space, leaking toxic additives, such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to biodegrade. That means bottled water may be harming our future water supply.

San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation's highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as our primary source. Every year, our water is tested more than 100,000 times to ensure that it meets or exceeds every standard for safe drinking water. And yet we still buy bottled water. Why?

Maybe it's because we think bottled water is cleaner and somehow better, but that's not true. The federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water.

The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as "pure" to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. But even that doesn't dampen the demand.

Clearly, the popularity of bottled water is the result of huge marketing efforts. The global consumption of bottled water reached 41 billion gallons in 2004, up 57 percent in just five years. Even in areas where tap water is clean and safe to drink, such as in San Francisco, demand for bottled water is increasing -- producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy. So what is the real cost of bottled water?

Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give 5 cents for recycling a small water bottle and 10 cents for a large one.

So it is clear that bottled water directly adds to environmental degradation, global warming and a large amount of unnecessary waste and litter. All this for a product that is often inferior to San Francisco's tap water. Luckily, there are better, less expensive alternatives:

-- In the office, use a water dispenser that taps into tap water. The only difference your company will notice is that you're saving a lot of money.

-- At home and in your car, switch to a stainless steel water bottle and use it for the rest of your life knowing that you are drinking some of the nation's best water and making the planet a better place.

Signing on to http://sfenvironment.org or http://sfwater.org to register not to buy bottled water for a year enters your name in a drawing to win a free stainless steel water bottle.

Feb 12, 2007 story : Bottled water a marketing triumph

While Environment Minister John Baird and the members of a special parliamentary committee on the environment snarl at each other over the wisdom of carbon taxes and Kyoto targets, Costco is busily trying to introduce a product we definitely don't need - 15-litre, non-returnable water bottles. Or maybe we should call them water tanks.

Surely the bottled-water industry has already buried us under enough non-returnable plastic. Half-litre- and litre-sized bottles are everywhere, littering our parks, our streets and our hiking trails. Executives sip them in business meetings, parents pack them in their kids' school lunches, college students slurp them in class and shoppers tote them around the stores. The last thing we need are giant versions of the same thing.

Sure, they're recyclable, but they're not reusable like the 18-litre drums you can pick up at supermarkets by paying a $10-deposit. Those things can be refilled up to 70 times before they have to be recycled. And anyway, how do you stuff a 15-litre barrel into a green box?

There is, of course, a far more environmentally friendly way to get drinking water, a method that doesn't require big trucks or plastic bottles or deposit-return networks, a system that has the approval of even such severe evaluators as David Suzuki. It's called turning on the tap.

Bottled water is, in fact, one of the great marketing coups of the 20th and 21st centuries. That business people have managed to persuade us to pay for drinking water - often more than we pay for gasoline - staggers belief, especially when you consider that we already pay plenty every year in municipal taxes to have potable water piped right into our homes and offices. It's difficult to know whether to applaud the brilliance of corporate salesmen, or lament the gullibility of consumers.

Feb 1, 2007 story : Buying bottled water is wrong, says Suzuki

Canadians wanting to do something about the environment can start by drinking tap water, environmentalist David Suzuki says. "Everywhere I go across Canada, I insist I be given tap water when I get up to speak," Suzuki told CBC News on Thursday.

Moreover, he said it's destructive to import bottled water from producers in countries such as France. "It's nuts to be shipping water all the way across the planet, and us — because we're so bloody wealthy — we're willing to pay for that water because it comes from France," he said in an interview.

Key environmental issues with bottled water, Suzuki said, are waste and uncertainty over the long-term health effects created by plastic. "Not only does bottled water lead to unbelievable pollution — with old bottles lying all over the place — but plastic has chemicals in it," he said.

August 2007 TT Post

Start using steel water bottles

We know buying water in plastic bottles is bad for the environment. We should run our tap water through our own filtered water pitcher and then fill our own water bottle. What kind of water bottle? Sometimes the answer is in an old design.

From an Aug 4, 2007 TreeHugger.com posting titled The Perfect Road-Trip, Water Bottle - A 62 Year Old Design. :

When I was a kid, I'd fill [the steel bottle] up for my bicycle trip, soaking the canvas completely and letting it hang off the back of my bicycle seat springs with the built in belt hooks (shown above). The evaporative cooling from wind passing by the wet canvas kept the water inside cool on the way to the swimming hole.

Almost seventy years after it's manufacture, there's not a spot of rust anywhere, the canvas is completely intact. And, a decade of kid- and teen-abuse barely shows. The Bakelite cover, the only fossil fuel-based component, is free of cracks and wear. Not a single component contains Bis Phenol-A.

It's not sexy, or pretty. But it works perfectly, and is likely to remain functional for a century. There's no reason that more attractive versions, in a variety of shapes, can't be made. Stainless steel would be fine for the bottle as long as the top is equally rugged. What are we waiting for?

I noticed at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op store that they sell a stainless steel 20 oz water bottle that comes in red, blue, and green for, I think, around $9.00. It's made by a company called New Wave Enviro.

According to the side of the box for one of these bottles, I thought a canvas cover or something like that was also available, but I don't see that accessory on the company's Web site.

Amazon.com sells the bottle for $8.79. If you're crazy interested, then you may as well get one at the co-op. I may try one. I'm always filling plastic water bottles, not the good kind of plastic, and taking one or two with me when I'm out and about birding or whatever.

The bottled water bottles from the store or the vending machine are more comfortable to use than some of those bottles that are built with the kind of plastic you're suppose to use when reusing a bottle over and over.

Another company, Klean Kanteen, offers stainless steel water bottles in sizes from 12 oz to 40 oz. Their bottles are silver on the outside, which may be better since it appears the color coating on the New Wave Enviro bottles chips away. The Klean Kanteens also cost a lot more.

And there's the Sigg aluminum water bottle. Anyone have experience with using steel or aluminum water bottles?

June 2016 Facebook Post

https://m.facebook.com/jonathanbyrdmusic/photos/a.135467294465.131262.52222059465/10155003497269466/?type=3&refid=7&_ft_=qid.6291975404088096174%3Amf_story_key.8610203944026884901

Excerpts:

Bottled water is one of the biggest environmental disasters of our time. Only 23% of plastic in the US is recycled. The EPA standards for bottled water are lower than for municipal water, and 25% of bottled water is municipal water anyway!

Let's break that down. We use valuable oil to make plastic bottles. We fill the plastic bottles with tap water. We put all this really heavy water on a truck and deliver it. We pay for it and drink it in a building that has indoor plumbing. IT'S SO STUPID.

We fill up our Hydro Flasks and take them on stage. We keep them in the car and fill them at gas stations.

Y'all know I like big trucks but 17 million barrels of oil a year are already used to make plastic bottles, not including the oil it takes to transport it.

i like to use metal water bottles, and i really like using the plastic bobble bottle that contains its own filter.

http://www.waterbobble.com

#environment #water