Drowning in water bottles

Newmarket

Oct 29, 2007 09:47 PM

Eco-Speak
By: Carol Cooper

Believing in the merits of bottled water, Canadians are guzzling it at a great rate.

In 2005 alone, we downed 28.5 billion litres of it.

But concerns about the product and its packaging are beginning not only to taint bottled water’s image, but leading to outright rejection of a commodity once considered cool.

Witness environmentalist David Suzuki, who refuses to drink bottled water, and celebrity chefs, such as Alice Waters and Mario Batali, who have banished it from their restaurants.

On a larger scale, San Francisco and Salt Lake City forbid bottled water in their municipalities’ departments.

Then there’s New York City, which has begun an advertising campaign promoting the superiority of its municipal water to bottled.

And Chicago is considering taxing bottled water to the tune of 10 cents a unit.

Also getting in on the game is the Town of Blue Mountain near Collingwood, which has just prohibited consumption of bottled water inside town buildings.

Individuals and municipalities are showing concern bottling water not only privatizes it, but degrades the environment.

Here’s the rundown on ecological concerns:
• Water for bottling can be drawn from springs and aquifers, depleting them, as well as nearby wetlands and rural wells;

• Transportation of the water, first for bottling, then when shipped to stores and, finally, hauled home in cars, trucks or mini-vans (when’s the last time you saw someone on a bus carrying a carton of water?) burns oil, a non-renewable resource. As well, all these vehicles spew fumes, which we then get to breathe;

• Water bottles, themselves, are made of oil, see above.

• Their manufacture results in nasty byproducts;

• While the bottles are recyclable, not all of them hit the blue box, turning them into one of our favourite street ornaments, often still containing water; and

• Recycling helps, but comes at environmental (and financial) costs of its own. Heavy trucks haul the bottles from curbside blue boxes to York Region’s waste management depot in East Gwillimbury where they’re baled along with other beverage bottles made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate).

From the depot, they head back out on to the highway for markets throughout Ontario and Quebec. Last year, we shipped out 1,962 metric tonnes of PET-containing bales, creating even more unwanted and unnecessary air pollution.

So how to cut the environmental costs? Pretty straightforward, really. Municipal water is just as safe as bottled water.

In fact, a lot of bottled water is municipal water, run through a filter.

Heaving bottled water may give you and your wallet a good workout, but unnecessarily so. You can save yourself both ways, either by drinking tap water straight up or, if you don’t like the taste, by running it through one of the many filters available for home use, into refillable containers.

Cheers.

For more information on concerns about bottle water, visit  www.kairoscanada.org” www.kairoscanada.org. To follow developments in the anti-bottled water movement click on www.insidethebottle.org.