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The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'
by possibly noteworthy at 7:33 am EST, Jan 23, 2008

It's like SMS.

Bottled water has a huge environmental footprint, the critics now say. It takes immense amounts of raw material and energy to make all those plastic bottles. At the other, postconsumer end of the product life cycle, hundreds of millions of empty plastic bottles end up in landfills, in an era when it is increasingly difficult to find new waste-disposal sites.
And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. Tests over the past several decades have shown that bottled water is about as good as tap water; some samples test worse, with contaminants that exceed Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Better taste? When blindfolded, taste testers can't typically tell which sample is from a bottle and which is from the tap.
Customers pay maybe a thousand times as much as they would pay for the same amount of water from the tap. They get little or no benefit for the extra expense, while society as a whole incurs the environmental costs. No wonder we are seeing something of a backlash.
...
We need to encourage technological innovations that provide us with adequate amounts of material goods while dumping lower levels of hazardous materials into our environment. For that, we will need a new, more vibrant, more adamant kind of environmental activism. That will happen, in turn, only if Americans reject the mirage of inverted quarantine, reject the seductive but false idea that there are purely individual solutions to our collective problems.

RE: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'
by Decius at 8:52 am EST, Jan 23, 2008

possibly noteworthy wrote:
And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. Tests over the past several decades have shown that bottled water is about as good as tap water; some samples test worse, with contaminants that exceed Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Better taste? When blindfolded, taste testers can't typically tell which sample is from a bottle and which is from the tap

Censors are always asserting that the thing they wish the censor has no real value anyway. They are usually wrong. Having just spent two weeks in Europe the assertion that tap water is "about as good as bottled water" is almost as laughable as the idea that you can get carbonated water from a tap. But why do Americans drink bottled water? Its convenient.

At home you don't have to bother filling bottles yourself, you don't have to keep track of the bottles after you are finished, and you can keep it in the fridge where it will be cold when you need it. And when you pop into a convenience store or use a drink machine you are generally presented with a collection of high calorie drinks and a few disgusting diet beverages with artificial sweeteners that don't quite taste right, as well as bottled water. While I deeply wish beverage manufacturors would market prepackaged zero calorie drinks that were genuinely tasty, like unsweet tea or crystal lite, they simply don't. I have to assume most Americans don't want such things. For the rest of us there is bottled water.

Americans would be better off if they drank more bottled water, instead of the myriad kinds of bottled corn syrup they instead injest, which surely cannot be better for the environment. Is it really the case that water bottles out number Coke bottles in our nations land fills? Impossible! This country has a serious obesity problem, and I'll admit my personal contribution to it. Ending that starts with a reduction in caloritic intake.

But I'm sure environmentalists will soon start admonishing me for drinking bottled water (ignoring those who drink bottled Coke), just as they have admonished me for driving a Ford Explorer (ignoring those who drive sports cars) and before that they admonished me for using a cell phone (ignoring the impact of overhead telephone wires). These are people who rejoice in the opportunity to tell you off for engaging in a behavior that they disapprove of, particularly if that behavior is new or high tech. They are like the church ladies of a prior generation. Punk rock made them liberal but didn't quell their taste for self-aggrandizing social control.

Instead of organizing armies to fight the popularity of bottled water why don't these people advocate that water bottling companies use bio-degradable bottles?