Enviro-mental

Bottled water is one of my pet peeves, so I’m very happy to see Waterloo Region school banning their sale on school property. I’m sure this decision will be met with opposition, but phooey on the dissenters. There are so many reasons bottled water is bad.

Much of bottled water comes from from the municipal tap water supply. It is the exact same stuff that comes out of the tap at home, bottled, labelled, and wrapped in plastic.

Beyond the excess energy required to manufacture, label and transport the water, who in their right mind would pay anything - let alone a dollar per bottle - for the stuff you get for free?

It turns out lots of people do. University students are famous for keeping bottled water in their apartments for tossing into their backpacks and sucking back after returning home from the bar. For many, it’s convenience that wins them over. Others don’t trust tap water (and don’t know their bottled is from the same source), or are just too lazy to buy, wash and re-fill their own plastic water bottles. A friend of mine used to pack a bottle of water in her lunch - drink it, and throw it out, every day.

A case of bottled tap water costs about $5.00 for 24 bottles, or about 21 cents per bottle. That’s under $3.00 per week; it seems like a steal. But because it’s free from the tap - and because the environmental effects of plastic are heinous - plastic’s environmental impacts are expensive.

Over the course of a year, a single person drinking three bottles per day would put nearly 1100 bottles into the landfill. But wait, what if you recycle?

Recycling is one tool we use to justify wasteful practices.  It does help reduce garbage, I suppose, but the energy needed to recycle plastic is high. And most plastics are not recycled into new plastic containers for food, because of potential contaminants. They are made into plastic benches for parks, stepping stones, lunch boxes and eco-friendly jewelry. But at some point, everybody will have more than enough benches and there will be nothing to do with all the plastic bottles.

Plastic does. not. biodegrade.

Does Size Matter?

A popular brand of tap-water bottlers has been running ads in newspapers and magazines lately, promoting a new “eco” bottle that uses less plastic than their previous bottles. This enrages me - multi-national companies with huge advertising budgets finding ways to make themselves look “green” to seduce customers into buying their product. And the savings that comes from using fewer raw materials go right into their pockets, not yours.

If companies like Nestle really cared about the environment, they would stop bottling water.

People who are worried about the quality of tap water should:

a) Read the fine print to ensure they aren’t just buying bottled tap water;

b) Invest in a filtration system;

c) Purchase bulk spring water in reusable plastic jugs;

d) Get involved in making our municipal water supply healthier.

The rest of us should re-evaluate how we look at consumer goods - and ban plastic water bottles from our homes, too.