Monday, February 18, 2008

Bottled Water Is "Immoral"

The Telegraph (UK) reported yesterday that bottled water harms the environment.

Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a [British] government adviser.

"We have to make people think that it's unfashionable just as we have with smoking. We need a similar campaign to convince people that this is wrong," said Tim Lang, the Government's naural resources commissioner.

Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added that the amount of money spent on mineral water "borders on being morally unacceptable".

A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.

This is such a good vindication of my lifestyle. I drink tap water. At work (when I've had a job), I always drank the tap water even though they provided bottled, which horrified most of the other people there. You'd have thought I was drinking a glass of toxic waste. But as I explained, the tap water was safe, and if I got to like bottled water, I'd have to start spending money on it.

Now I have an even better reason to keep drinking tap water. I'm saving the planet from global warming. Al Gore would be so proud!

7 comments:

Jacob said...

Gahh, I HATE people who moan about how crappy tap water is, and how good bottled water is by comparison. Really, it isn't that bad, and it's not going to kill me. In fact, the fluoride is probably doing good for my teeth.

Bear in mind though that there is NO tap water more horrible than the tap water in drought-ravaged Australia, and on top of that, there is NO tap water more horrible in Australia than my home city. We source our water from a river that runs through NSW and Victoria, meaning that the dredge we end up with is more or less arse-flavoured soup.

But yeah. Tap water, woo.

SkyePuppy said...

Jacob,

There may be tap water more horrible than yours. At my mom's house, in Cisco, Texas, the city water department issued a statement about the quality of the water. It said (in serious legalese) that they couldn't remove everything that's supposed to be removed and people shouldn't really drink it. So I drank my mom's filtered water or bottled water. But other than there, I drink from the tap.

BTW, You look so much better in blue than in pink. Have you lost weight...?

Malott said...

In Indiana some... maybe most... wells are tainted with herbicide and other agricultural run-off. I figure the farmers think, "If 30 gallons per acre is good, 100 must be great!"

Anyway, there is a high cancer rate around here, and the first thing patients are told is, "stop drinking well water."

I buy gallon jugs of mountain spring water from Sam's club to make my coffee and tea... I even use it to cook water absrbing foods like spaghetti, and when I'm boiling beef or chicken for soup.

I'm not a "nut" about it... At work I drink water from the tap as well as when I eat out.

Now there may be a guy in New Jersey filling up these jugs from his kitchen tap... But, we do what we can.

SkyePuppy said...

Chris,

What does the herbicide and other agricultural run-off do to/for your tomatoes?

Malott said...

Pupster,

The root system of my tomato plants are impressive, but they don't venture deep enough to reach the water table.

However... Every year I have a corn, or soybean field right behind my property... And when the farmer sprays when there is a northerly breeze, my rhubarb suffers.

SkyePuppy said...

Oh no! Not the rhubarb! That's one of God's greatest gifts.

Jacob said...

I always looked hot.