Bonkers about bottled water? Well, your aqua obsession is a pain for the planet.
They stand in rows on the shelves of supermarkets everywhere, like a mini-United Nations. There’s Perrier and Evian from France. Fiji from, well, Fiji. San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna from Italy. Buxton and Malvern from Britain. Gerolsteiner from Germany. Poland Spring (from Maine, not Poland). And many more.
Bottled water, that is. A luxury? Not for many, who buy for several reasons, including bad-tasting water from their kitchen sinks and promises of healthy minerals from the bottled brands.
And then there are the water snobs — sorry, connoisseurs — such as the members of the Fine Water Society, who gather to taste H2O from all over the globe.
Fine, you might say, let people drink what they want. Except that the world’s obsession with bottled water is a triple whammy against the environment. Let us count the ways:
Much pollution is caused by transporting it. To have that colorful Fiji Water bottle in your home means that it has to be transported from a remote Pacific island (5,559 miles to California). Which means pollution. For instance, Treehugger, a sustainability organization, calculated that it takes a quarter gallon of fossil fuel to transport a liter bottle of Fiji Water to the U.S. And, of course, many of other brands also come from overseas.
After that there’s the packaging. It’s usually in plastic bottles. And plastic bottles mean they’re oil-derived products that add yet more pollution to the air, quite apart from problems with disposing of used containers.
And then there’s depletion of aquifers, which sometimes deprives local people of adequate water supplies, and the lack of access to local springs that have been bought by bottled water companies. For instance, reports AP, a source in Samtse, a Bhutanese town in the Himalayan foothills, now supplies water described as “nectar” to rich people hundreds of miles away in India. Except that the company, Veen, has fenced off the spring from villagers, who used to fill up buckets to take home.
Maybe it’s time to favor the faucet.
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