The Seattle Post-Intelligencer put the lid on bottled water today, exposing its typical inferiority to tap water in a number of different ways, especially in terms of ecological responsibility:
America's infatuation with drinking high-priced "natural" water from a bottle rather than from the tap is contributing to global warming and could even qualify as an immoral act.
That, at least, is the position of a number of environmental, social justice and religious organizations.
Join me below the fold for some water sport...
Boss: Boys, we need more profits. But I don’t want to spend any money on it. We need a "lifestyle" product. What we do, see, is take something people can already get at home or in public for pennies and charge ‘em a boatload of money for it—
Exec. Veeps: Good idea, Boss!
Boss: Shuddap! What we do is charge ‘em where it hurts to buy into this idea that our product is enriching their pathetic little lives somehow. But! It’s not enough just to rip ‘em off. We have to come up with the cheapest, most audacious product imaginable...and to get there we have to waste as many natural resources as we can, pollute the environment, muck up our landfills with a lot of crap, and do it all in the name of selling the little suckers an inferior product that we have the brass to say is healthier, cooler, and safer than any alternative. So I put it to ya, boys, what do we sell?
EVPs: Dirt! Fish heads! Pond scum!
Boss: Shuddap! Somebody remind me why I feed you guys a trough full of money every day?
EVPs: How about a box with nothing in it?
Boss: Ooh, I like it! I like it. But that’s too esoteric. Come on...what’s the cheapest, most commonplace crap we can dump into that box, and then jack up the price as high as our inflated salaries?
EVPs: Er...pond scum? No—the pond!
Boss: Of course! Water! That’s good for ya, right? Take an empty bottle, fill it with some crap water, slap a Swiss Alps label on it, charge two bucks a pop, and tell the little suckers bottoms up!
EVPs: Boss, you are a genius!
Boss: Hell yeah I am. Break out the cigars.
~~~~~
The moral of the story is that, yes, those executives should be pretty pleased with themselves indeed—for they have pulled off the ultimate corporate coup: They’re selling us something that falls out of the sky for prices that sure as hell never do. In so doing, they put an enormous "drain" (ha ha) on our natural resources and environmental health by creating an entire, redundant infrastructure for the inefficient delivery of the Earth’s most prolific liquid.
When you buy bottled water, you are buying two things: A lifestyle, and the bottle. The bottle can be useful, if you’re on the go—no arguments there. But it takes a special kind of idiot to buy a bottle, fill it up once—with friggin water—and then throw it away and buy a new one to do the same thing, over and over again. Rinse and repeat. Or rather, don’t rinse. Just buy a whole new bottle for some real green. $11 billion a year? Wow. Just...wow.
It takes a lot of heavy machinery and manpower to get that water out of the ground, into a bottle, onto a truck, and up on store shelves. That wastes oil, it wastes materials—it wastes water.
And for what? America has one of the finest tap water systems on Earth! Tap water is regulated by the stringent and zealous Environmental Protection Agency. They are really good at what they do. Seattle in particular has some truly exceptional water. Everywhere I have been in this region, the water has been refreshing and delicious. Clean, crisp water...ahh! They test the water, they treat it, they test it again...it’s safe and clean. Notwithstanding some old homes with bad plumbing—which is the problem of property owners and not the municipal water authority—I’d choose Seattle water over any bottled alternative.
That’s because bottled water isn’t regulated by the EPA. It is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FDA—the same folks who would rather let your pets die from contaminated food than reveal the names of the double-dealing companies involved in the continuing misuse of this tainted wheat, rice, and corn we’ve been hearing about.
Now, to be fair, the FDA is a pretty fine agency too—at least when it’s not being run by anti-government Republicans—but their standards for bottled water are not nearly as stringent as are the EPA’s for tap water, especially major municipal water systems.
Another problem with bottled water is that, despite FDA regulation, private corporations are in charge of administering it. All of us know that businesses are for profits first, and quality second. To the extent quality maximizes profits, great! But we know how that always turns out: Cut as many corners as possible without killing your customers or going to jail.
Not so with tap water, and that is the way it should be. There are some fundamental quality-of-life services that the private sector should simply never, ever get their greedy little paws on, including water, power, education, healthcare, and transit infrastructure. Food and drugs, too, but that’s where the FDA comes in.
I simply do not understand the obsession with bottled water. For soft drinks, it’s a different story. Coke doesn’t fall out of the sky. The government has no reason to provide Coke on public tap. So it is up to private enterprise to meet the demand. That’s fine. But bottled water? Rubbish! There is already a perfectly good—indeed, a superior—water infrastructure in place. Why spend hundreds of times more money for an inferior product that harms the environment and squanders our resources?
I am the only person at work who drinks water in a mug, from the sink. Everybody else drinks coffee, tea, soda, or—you guessed it—bottled water. What sheer folly! You have been bamboozled, fellow citizens! You are throwing your money away on the most shameless marketing scam of our generation. Really, and truly, you are paying for a bottle, and a lifestyle. That’s it.
Here’s the bottom line:
Bottled water is what you use when good, clean tap water isn’t available and you haven’t got the means to purify a raw source. In the United States, that relegates bottled water as a person’s premiere choice of water to a pretty small market. But even then it only makes sense as a short-term solution. It will always be far cheaper in the long run to build tap water infrastructure, or to dig a well and purchase your own filtering apparatus if you live so remotely from civilization that water mains are an impossibility. And if your particular tap water system doesn’t match up to bottled water in quality, then your water authority is either underfunded, inept, or cutting corners, and you should take that message to your city and state politicians. Don’t settle for bottled water. Just. Don’t. Do. It.
~~~~~
Boss: Shuddap! Don’t listen to that liar! It’s all a pack of socialist fibs! You need our overpriced water! It’s good for you, convenient, pure, clean, and trendy. Drink it, and live like a king!