oil & water

"In Praise of Tap Water," a recent editorial in the NY Times, just reminded me that I've been meaning to write a post about tap v. bottled water for some time now. In a nutshell: you should stop buying bottled water. Or at least avoid it as much as humanly possible. Why?

- It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to make all those plastic bottles (and that's for the U.S. alone).

- When the fossil fuels burned during shipping are taken into consideration, consuming a one-liter bottle of water means consuming one liter of oil. (stats at Treehugger)

- Only 23% of those bottles are recycled, meaning that billions of these things are turning up in landfills and slowly degrading into toxic plastic dust that contaminates our soil and waterways.

- IT'S A WASTE OF YOUR MONEY!!!! Tap water is safe, clean, and does not cost $1.50 per glass. If you don't like the way yours tastes, a simple filter will fix that.

Instead, why not get into the habit of filling up a bottle from your tap at home before you leave for the day? You can follow No Impact Man's example and reuse a glass bottle or pick up a Nalgene if you want to be trendy.

If you need a visual to help convince you to ditch the bottled water habit, check this out. The photo was created by a blogger at Acterra and quite literally shows you how much oil it took to ship each bottle of water from its source to the author in San Francisco. Uh, yuck. (Originally found here.)