Hooray for Mayor Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, Utah who refuses to allow bottled water to be sold at any event and offered recyclable cup drawn from 5-gallon jugs. And applause for the San Francisco restaurant who won’t carry bottled water on their menu.
50,000,000,000 bottles of water per year = how many tons of plastic added to waste; how much fuel used to truck from supplier to distributor to sales point.
"In addition, the entire process — bottling, packaging and shipping — creates pollution and greenhouse gases.
"It’s ironic that on some of the labels of the bottles, you see snow-capped mountains and glaciers when in fact the production of the bottle is contributing to global warming, which is melting those snowcaps and those glaciers," said Allen Hershkowitz at the Natural Resources Defense Council."
This is WATER, folks. A label on a plastic bottle doesn’t make it better.
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Where I live the water is so hard it can cause kidney stones. It tastes awful, too, even though it passes legal hygienic and toxicity standards, so we drink purified water. If you’ve ever tasted our tap water or had a kidney stone, the answer is easy, but ours comes from a home reverse osmosis unit, not bottles. That’s basically where most bottled water comes from, reverse osmosis systems, before it’s put into bottles. Purchasing it in bottles is probably the least friendly to the environment, but even the reverse osmosis process is slightly wasteful. It uses a little more water than it produces, and there are plastics in the housings for the filters. But there’s a lot less plastic involved, since the filters are only changed every few months. I wonder if Salt Lake City has similar hard water problems, and if so, whether filtered water is provided at events and restaurants. After a few months here (San Diego County), a new faucet flowing unsoftened and unfiltered tap water can built up enough crusty calcification to be able to chip it off. Every time I see that build-up on my shower or faucets, I’m glad it’s not inside me.
Totally understandable, Barbara. We happen to have well water that’s loaded with minerals but it’s delcious. One of our friends has water that smells sulphurous but tastes fine. But I think that in a situation away from home–where a constant problem would indeed require alternatives–what the mayor and the resturanteur have offered is a step in the right direction and helps put a dent in a growing problem of environmental damage.