on friday we had a semi-serious discussion about the evils of bottled water. Here's a link to the article I mentioned discussing some of the problems and environmental harms of the bottled water industry.
Message in a bottle
Some crazy facts:
- Americans spent more money last year on bottled water than on ipods or movie tickets: $15 Billion.
- We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year -- in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.
- We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)
- And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water.
- If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
- Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.
- Sometime this year, Fiji Water will eclipse sugarcane as the number-one export from Fiji. That is, the amount of sugar harvested and processed for export by some 40,000 seasonal sugar workers will equal in dollar value the amount of water bottled and shipped by 200 water bottlers.
- Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water; 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water.
Anyway, if you read this and still think "bottled water tastes better" let me know, and I'll be happy to set up a test to show you that you can't distinguish bottled water from the water right out of the tap in Westminster, or your house for that matter.
