Bottled water — think about it
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”
— Marshall McLuhan
Ready to reduce your toilet paper use? Hold a flush?
Thought not.
Politicians seem oblivious to the steady rise in food cost. Only gas prices are newsy.
Ethanol is one ingredient influencing gas and food prices. Can we cannot stop using enough of either to make a difference?
Nope, out of our hands.
Summer weather may not be so sunny under the looming storm clouds of rising prices and worsening pollution. Heard Lake Pepin is silting up?
Not much we can do about that either.
The other ingredient we fail to control is overwhelming human numbers, or demand.
Some walk, bike and set thermostats at 76 degrees; most have no clue.
Hybrid cars reduce petrol consumption and are environmentally friendly, but battery manufacturing/disposal and so on offsets gains.
So, what’s a dodger do to feel good, save a buck and battle pollution?
How about drinking only tap water?
Bottled water seems innocuous, until one realizes its cost is enormous and it is enormously wasteful; aside from the fact we already pay (municipalities/well diggers) for water.
Check this: Most water bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is a polymer derived from oil. So, it takes 17 million barrels of oil each year to make water bottles for the U.S. market — enough oil to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year.
About 37,800 18-wheelers deliver bottled water around the U.S. every week.
Manufacturing and filling the plastic water bottles, on average wastes 30 to 40 percent of the water involved in the process. This is partly because the bottle-making machines are cooled by water.
Only 23 percent of water bottles are recycled — 38 billion are landfilled each year.
The U.S is the largest consumer market for bottled water in the world. In 2008, bottled water sales in the U.S. topped 8.6 billion gallons. Between 1990 and 1997, U.S. sales of bottled water shot from $115 million to $4 billion.
NSA Water Filters