Bottled Water Injustice

I've become one of those weirdos who gets really upset when I see people doing something I consider irresponsible - drinking bottled water. I have so far held back on my ranting, but especially now that I live in NYC where tap water is so clean my tolerance is low and dipping.

The Irish Times reported on Penn Teller's mockumentary about bottled water consumption in the US. In it, a fancy restaurant serves different kinds of water including one called L’eau Du Robinet (French for “tap water”) and another one with a spider in it, purportedly straight from the Amazon - haven't you heard of the healing powers of spiders? The water was all served from the tap and no one knew the difference - in fact they paid a whole lot of money for that water. That also reminds me of the Minnie Driver film where she's a waitress at a dive-y restaurant and this mean woman who is with the man she loves is being bitchy asking for bottled water and Minnie (sassy lady that she is) fills a bottle with tap water and seals it and the woman doesn't even notice, obviously.

Anyway, the politics of bottled water upset me more. The article reports:

Last year, BBC television’s Panorama current affairs programme investigated the high environmental cost of our strange love affair with bottled water. Fiji Water is indeed sourced in Fiji, then shipped more than 10,000 miles to Europe and beyond.

Meanwhile, one in three Fijians doesn’t have access to safe drinking water, and illnesses and deaths from typhus and other waterborne diseases are common on the island. The extraction of huge amounts of water for export is draining the island’s aquifers, putting even more pressure on supplies for the islanders.

Globally, as we ship billions of bottles of water from exotic-sounding locales to assuage our new-found thirst for water as a lifestyle accessory, 3,000 children die each day as a direct result of drinking contaminated water.

Globally, bottled water requires the production of about 300 billion plastic bottles a year, of which maybe one in five is recycled. Transportation, packaging, distribution and dealing with the waste generates tens of millions of tonnes of carbon emissions – and for what exactly? About 40 per cent of all bottled water sold is simply municipal tap water put into plastic bottles by corporations such Pepsi (Aquafina) and Coca-Cola (Dasani) and then sold back to the public in plastic containers.

WE CAN DO BETTER! If you want filtered water, buy a Brita! I get it, tap water sometimes isn't safe. But get a Klean Kanteen or a Sigg or something - is it that hard?? OK I'm realizing this is me ranting -- to all my regular commenters (haha) feel free to share an alternate view.