The Truth About Water

America has this weird drinking problem. There are those in America that walk into the kitchen and look at the faucet, and then they walk into the bathroom and once again look at the faucet and think to themselves, "Instead of using the water on hand... let us buy some." According to the Earth Policy Institute report Americans drank more than 7 billion gallons of bottled water in 2004. The world wide consumption of bottled water has doubled in the last six years. To ship all the bottled water need for a year the water producing countries spend 1.5 billion barrels of oil, that is enough to 100,000 cars for the same year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter.

Any one who has ever been to Central Park on a hot day will notice how many plastic bottles end up in the garbage. Unlike soda cans, there is no incentive for the homeless (or to be more politically correct, habitat-and-hygienically-impaired) to take them out of the garbage to recycle them. Every plastic bottle takes 1,000 years to biodegrade.

When someone looks at the price of a bottle of water the numbers are rather alarming. At this point I would like to mention that there was extensive research to come up with the following numbers. By extensive I mean I went next door from the bank and asked the cashier of the deli. I just pointed at each bottle of water and asked what the price was. A 1.5 pint bottle of Poland Spring water costs $2.75. If you do the calculations a gallon of the same water will cost you $7.34. Now that is Poland Spring. If you buy Evian the numbers become even more absurd. That same bottle of water now costs you $7.60. While everyone goes crazy when the price of gas goes up 10 cents they seem not to care when they are buying water. If you were to buy a 1 quart bottle of Evian the price per gallon goes up. If you buy a gallon of Evian water one quart at a time you will spend $9.00 for a gallon.

Imagine this conversation... You know what would be a great thing to sell to the American public. Water! Yes, I know that they can get the stuff for free but I still think that it is a really good idea. Then on top of all that, suddenly the doctors start giving out in their minimum daily nutritional value opinions. Suddenly doctors state that every one must have eight 8oz. cups of water. Thats $9.00 dollars worth of water. Imagine if you live somewhere thats hot. You might as well invest in an underground river.

Why does the American public seem to want to import all of this water? In chemical and taste test it has been proven that bottled water and tap water are almost identical. In a world were a significant part of the populous does not have access to clean drinking water we have to have it trucked to us from thousand miles away. It becomes a gluttonous way of life. It is not more sophisticated to drink bottled water instead of tap. After all what kind of sophistication can you show when you are throwing your empty plastic bottles on the ground. It is true.

The United Nations Millennium Development Goal is a set goal that is trying to reduce the amount of people lacking access to safe driking water in half by the year 2015. The world currently spends $15 billion a year on water supply and sanitation but they spend $100 billion on bottled water so its not really such a big deal.

Why is there such feeling in the public that we can be wasteful with the worlds resources when others are not so fortunate? Why do we Use air-condition in our cars on a perfectly nice day while others are dieing from heat stroke? Why is our country so over weight when we have children in the world that are starving? Why do we demand high speed internet access when others do not have electricity? We have toilets that automatically wash our @$$es and they have no indoor pluming? We have $250.00 shoes abd they use plastic bottles and some string to turn them into sandals.

Time to wake up... I gave up bottled water a long while ago and I do not plan on going back...


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