Bottled Water
I read an interesting article on the water bottling industry on FastCompany.com. (link via Anil Dash and The Knowledge For Thirst)
I drink a lot of water. Probably between 5-8 liters a day. However, I use a polycarbonate bottle that I fill from the tap at home or the water fountain at work. I do drink bottled water, usually when traveling (I buy the gallon jugs and fill my bottle from that) or when it is provided at events. I particularly dislike venues that prohibit outside water and then charge you $3 for a tiny bottle. But that is not really the point of this article. I never really thought about the global impact bottled water had. I have well water that is filtered for drinking now, but everywhere else I have lived I had city water. The tap water was always fine to drink. It is hard for me to imagine places in the world that don’t have good tap water readily available. It really makes you think about buying a bottle of water. Especially when “24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi.” I’ve never heard of Fiji water, but apparently that is a high-end bottled water. Another quote from the article “Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water” is interesting to me since it makes the point that we are importing water from a place that does not have reliable water. It is also mentioned that the company is piping water to some villages, but obviously not to all of them. Water is something we tend to take for granted, so it is hard sometimes to remember that it is a finite resource and we are lucky to have readily available clean water to drink.
