Forever Bottled

Happy World Water Day!

We are well aware of the implications of bottled water. It's a wasteful money making industry that has often been proven not to offer anything different or better than the free and local version - tap water. The Food and Water Watch draws attention to the fossil fuels, oil and enormous amounts of water used for the production of the water bottles while only a tiny fraction of them ends up being recycled. The rest gets trashed and, because plastic degrades so slowly, it is likely that every water bottle ever produced still exists in some pile of garbage, somewhere.

Having read about similar studies countless times, as I was throwing an old water bottle with a sip or two of "stale" water left in it out of my car, I couldn't help but wonder... How many times have I done this without having drank or at least poured out the left over water? I started noticing that many people around me do the same thing too. This must cause for thousands of gallons of water to be trapped in barely degradable plastic. So, not only are we polluting our water and slowing down its purification through the ecosystem, but we may be actually trapping huge amounts of it in bottles buried in trash, disabling it from entering the ecosystem. I would be very interested to see some studies on the relevance of this phenomenon.

Random thought... If somebody had told me when I was little that, one day, I would actually purchase water, I would've probably considered them mad. Then, life in Beijing in the 90's brought me to the realization that not all tap water is drinkable. So, we boiled and cooled tap water every evening and, as much as my memory serves me, I still had not heard of anyone buying water. When did the idea of packaging and selling water become acceptable? It seems like it took a rather small fraction of my life for me to get used to this folly... What's next? Purchasing packaged clean air?