Water For Thought

Okay, we confess. In the Curmudgeon household, we consume a fair amount of bottled water. Seltzer water in quart bottles (the Curmudgeon's favorite) and plain old flat water in all kinds of shapes and sizes of bottles, sent off in school lunch boxes, camp daypacks, and soccer satchels, not to mention stashed into the cars for trips.

We do our best to recycle those plastic bottles the water comes in--probably better than most. But still, a few do end up in distant trash bins, from whence they likely end up in a landfill, where they will last for the next thousand years.

Perhaps its time for us to change. In this month's Fast Company, Charles Fishman writes in detail about the environmental costs of all that bottled water and suggests an alternative: your local tap. See "Message In A Bottle."

Noting that Americans spend $15 billion a year on bottled water, Fishman makes some good points:

Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We--a generation raised on tap water and water fountains--drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we're raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We've come to pay good money--two or three or four times the cost of gasoline--for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes.

The environmental costs don't just stop at the old landfill--there's the impact of moving all that water, which is quite large:

We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)

Moreover, while we luxuriate in bottled water we hardly need, others lack access to basic, clean drinking water. Take, for example, the residents of the island nation of Fiji:

[I]n Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

Fishman points out that if you paid the same amount for tap water as for even cheap bottled water, your monthly water bill would be around $9000. Fishman observes the oxymoron that something "as clean and pure as water" nonetheless "leaves a contrail." For example:

San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles--so much a part of the mystique of the water itself--weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh, dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The bottles are washed and rinsed, with mineral water, before being filled with sparkling Pellegrino--it uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottle for the liter we buy. The bubbles in San Pellegrino come naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its CO2 carefully--it is extracted from supercarbonated volcanic springwaters in Tuscany, then trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.

Fishman finishes with a great question: Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of water, it's reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle, not just "Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I'm about to spend?" but "Does the value equal the impact I'm about to leave behind?"

Tomorrow, when we head out to the McSoccerfest with the kids, we might just fill a few empty water bottles from out tap and see how it works out.

Yes Virginia, You Can Recycle Plastic Bottles And Bags!

Salon reports that the rate of recycling plastic bottles in the U.S. has declined from 40% in 1995 to only 23% in 2005. (See Plastic Fantastic Bottle Recycling.)
The total amount of plastic bottles recycled has stayed the same--about 775 million pounds--but the number of plastic bottles has nearly doubled during the same period of time, so the percent recycled has gone down (and the amount ending up in landfills has increased massively).

One reason for the decline is that many Americans apparently don't realize plastic bottles are just as recyclable as glass. So, readers, you're now on notice: recycle those plastic bottles.

(Most plastic bottles are made out of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The bottles can be ground up and turned into pseudo-polyester and other materials. Demand for ground PET is particularly high in China, which, according to Salon, can't get enough of the stuff at present.)

Also, you can recycle plastic bags (and keep them from decorating trees as in the photo above)! That includes not only the plastic bags you get at most grocery stores and other retailers, but the bags that your newspapers come in. DON'T put plastic bags in your recycling container--instead, you need to return them to your local grocery store, most of which have a bin for such returns. (You don't need to remember to return them too often: just set aside one plastic bag to hold the rest of them--you can cram an amazing volume of plastic bags into that one holding container.)

As Salon points out, we could easily boost the return rate for plastic bottles by imposing a five cents return deposit on them, something California has done with great success.