Water: New York City Wants to Make Water Fountains the Norm
You remember water fountains, right? If your grade school experience was anything like mine (Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Class of ’93!), you’ll recall getting your water not from a plastic Evian bottle, but straight from the ceramic fountain—usually kid-sized. The same went for parks, museums and public buildings—water fountains were common, and they were well used. The idea of buying a bottle of water because I was thirsty would have seemed very strange to eight year-old me (and his mind would have been totally blown by my PlayStation 3).
Obviously that’s changed in the years since. Today bottled water is a multi-billion dollar industry, and in 2008 Americans drank nearly 29 gallons of bottled water a year per person, more than twice the amount from a decade before. (See stats here.) Certainly that shift is a triumph for advertising that Don Draper would be proud to call his own, getting Americans to pay for a product that they can get for free. While the bottled water industry often trumpets the superior quality and purity of its product, independent tests have found little evidence to support those claims—and note that some of the most widely sold brands of bottled water, like Dasani and Aquafina, are little more than filtered tap water with fancy names.
But the reality is that there has been a shift away from sodas and other carbonated beverages towards water. And on health grounds, that makes sense—while there’s a wide disparity of opinion on the exact role that sugary beverages like soda can play in promoting obesity (a lot or a little), making clean water more available makes public health sense. Greens rightly worry about the environmental impact of bottled water, but let’s face it—it’s tough to depend on your BPA-free, stainless steel Klean Kanteen if there’s nowhere to fill it up. In New York, where I live, all commercial buildings are required to have water fountains—but good luck fitting your bottle into the nozzle.
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