Drink your own damn water

Here's a great article from the Earth Policy Institute on the movement to go back to drinking tap water instead of bottled, and the overwhelming reasons why that's the right thing to do:

With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing. ...

In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the United States each year requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil.

After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent—enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.

Concerns about this high energy use and the associated contribution to climate change, along with worries about waste, are driving many groups back to tap water.

I've been avoiding bottled water for a long time for many of these same reasons, though I hadn't thought the issue through this thoroughly, and seeing the myriad arguments against drinking bottled water marshaled like this just reinforces it.  Unless you find yourself in some scrofulous country where bacteria the size of pennies are collecting in the bottom of your glass, drinking bottled water instead of tap is just another way to enrich corporations and hasten the destruction of the planet.

I have a set of water bottles of various sizes I've collected over the years that I keep reusing, filling them with my own water and then drying them thoroughly when I'm done with them.  I use a water-filtering pitcher and fill the bottles out of that.  I used to do this when I'd fly as well, but now that we're not allowed to bring life-threatening water through security (as opposed to harmless Zippo lighters) I just take an empty bottle with me and fill it from the water fountains on the other side.

This is one of those incredibly simple things you can do to make the world a slightly better place.  Hopefully someday we'll reach the point where drinking bottled water is considered as socially unacceptable as going to Starbucks or voting Republican.

UPDATE: You may have heard that plastic water bottles degrade over time and release toxins that can cause you to sprout new appendages in embarrassing places, but it's an urban legend.  Poppycock.  Balderdash.  So drink from your reused plastic bottle without fear, and with the knowledge that every sip makes you the greatest environmental hero in all of recorded history.

Comments

[nullentropy]

Resisting the commercial pressure to stop buying plastic water bottles is tough. It's the right choice to make but, don't forget all of those PCBs and other plasticizers that degrade from your reused bottle. That stuff isn't good for living organisms. PCBs can trick your body into thinking they are natural hormones. You might grow manboobs!

[Ashley Sue]

Nice covering the multiple lows of bottled water... which filtration system do you use? I just found out mine doesn't filter the stuff I want it to... so I'm on to something else, I guess.

[John Caruso]

nullentropy: Actually, degradation of plastic bottles is a myth (or see here for details). Which isn't a surprise; we should always be skeptical of claims like these when they tend to favor the bottom lines of huge corporations. So you can reuse those bottles with no worries and a clean conscience.

Ashley Sue: Nothing fancy--I just have a Brita water pitcher. If you find something better, I'd be happy to hear about it. Even unfiltered tap water is often the same or higher quality than bottled, though, so although I do like to use filtered water I'm not religious about it.

[Duncan]

I see that Culligan makes a 2-quart water pitcher that costs about half of what the Brita costs at Target. As an American TV baby by heritage, I'm afraid I'd say "Hey, Culligan man!" every time I took it out of the refrigerator, but aside from that it looks good. Maybe I'll look at the Consumers Union magazines at the library and see what they say about all this.