The Story of Bottled Water
Bottled water is really a problem. Everyone needs to stop drinking it now.
Though this video misses the real reason so many people buy bottled water. It isn't because they don't trust their tap water (at least this is the case in Portland), but because it is really darn convenient.
Just get a Nalgene for crying out loud!
25 March 2010 03:47pm UTC • 287 views • 10 comments
Tagged with water, advertising, environment
Add a comment!
You must be a member to do that! Become a member or login!
Subscribe to the feeds:
10 comments
Seamonster Mom
25 March 2010 05:53pm UTC
Like!
Drinking fountains are also a really good source of drinking water outside the home. I fear that if we don't keep on using them, architects will delete them from building plans. I love drinking fountains! Especially the cold ones, using refrigeration....a whole other waste of resources. Am trying to learn to enjoy room temperature water.
Sailing Master Keri
26 March 2010 05:48pm UTC
I love drinking fountains too!
Peon Peetie
28 March 2010 09:05am UTC
that's a pretty good video. i liked the animations.
i've always hated bottled water. as many of you may recall, i've almost always had a nalgene dangling from my bag (note: nalgenes aren't exactly the best either. their plastic was "invented" originally to build cages for animal testing, and the older models degrade if the water inside them is too hot). watching this video made me _really_ hate bottled water. i also remember working at the broadmoor, and people would spend $7 (!!!) on a bottle of water instead of using colorado tap, which was rated the cleanest in the country, and likely far cleaner than the bottled water they were having.
however, it's not always as simple as drinking from the tap. i live in a country with 1.3bil people. first of all, probably less than .000001% are even remotely aware that the environment is anything other than what the government builds for us to use. they all obviously need to drink water. and the tap is so bad that some people who come here (who are way more paranoid than i am) use bottled water to brush their teeth.
her solution is to lobby with the government, try to get drinking fountains back, etc. but this government is probably less environmentally aware than even the 99.999999% of people.
i do what i can. i use the big bottles of water that water coolers use. they reuse the bottles after cleaning them, so it actually costs less to get one of these big bottles (which is 19 liters) than buying four of the little 300ml ones. i use the tap for dishes, shower, teeth, etc. i use tap when i boil water (but figure boiling water will kill more of the universe in gas use than using water cooler water if i'm not boiling it anyway).
i guess my point, if i have one, is that the majority of the planet has water so dirty some people wouldn't even brush their teeth with it. india, china, all of southeast asia (including HK, one of the most developed and sophisticated cities i've ever been to), have the highest population densities in the world, and they still use bottled water. so how can we help?
in closing, i'd like to state that the company i work for has a huge role in water processing facilities, and we do a ton of stuff with governments trying to clean up the water. sadly, we also do a lot for bottled water (but not nearly as much as beer companies who need clean water, etc). i'd also like to say it seems a given that we shouldn't buy bottled water. i'm not even gonna argue that with people, because there's no reason to buy it. but now let's pool our ideas and give a talk at TED about making the rest of the world have tap water that they can use.
(sorry for the really long rant on this)
Peon Peetie
28 March 2010 09:06am UTC
(also, did they mention how many of the world's resources went into the resource-intensive flash video player they were using?)
Peon Peetie
30 March 2010 04:02am UTC
I gues it's getting better
Swabie Scabbie
31 March 2010 01:23am UTC
I love the gist of Peter's "rant," but I think the situation is a bit more complex that the link above suggests. I was in Peru with some other med students last summer doing a mostly unscientific "needs assessment" for future projects medical students could undertake there, and after a lot of research into water projects, we decided that training of local health volunteers would have a much bigger impact.
We even encouraged an NGO with a long-term presence in the area to move away from the types of water projects they've started building because research indicates they don't actually change rates of diarrheal illness, and they may exacerbate health problems when children are raised on filtered water, lack immunity to river water, then start drinking river water out of necessity when the community's water pump breaks (which we saw in one community), chlorine runs out (which we saw in several communities) or water treatment stops working (which nobody would know, since there isn't regular water quality testing or maintenance of the rural health treatment facilities built by NGOs or government grants).
We had a lecturer talk about water/sanitation issues in global health in an elective I took last year who mentioned that some research indicated having any running water in the home is more important than having communal taps with treated water. This was presumably because people could wash their hands with water in the home, which decreases microbial loads on people's hands even if the water's untreated. It makes sense, especially after some water engineers from CU (who were in the same area of Peru while we were there) found that the buckets people used to carry and store water had way more microbes than the river. A great study on water treatment and diarrheal infections in the area had similar findings; the one factor that seemed to have the highest correlation with lower diarrheal disease was having a covered storage container for water.
I know your experience in urban China is very different from mine in rural Peru, and I think the developing world is moving more towards urban China than rural Peru, so I think treated water worldwide should probably be the ultimate goal. But it looks like there may be other, more effective means to the same ends (preventing water-born diseases) in the near future.
(sorry to commandeer your website for an essay Benji - Peter's comments sparked some thoughts, so I wanted to respond)
Dread Pirate Benjamin
1 April 2010 08:00pm UTC
No apologies required! Commandeer away!
Seamonster Mom
3 April 2010 01:17am UTC
Very interesting observations from around the world--good topic Dread! Thought-provoking...
Seamonster Mom
4 April 2010 02:15am UTC
I am reading Three Cups of Tea and got on the internet to find information about Greg Mortenson, who seems to be doing pretty amazing work in cooperation with the population to build schools in Afghanistan. Here is a comment in a review of his new book Stones into Schools: One typical thing that galls Mr. Mortenson here is the “ridiculous boondoggle” of an effort, financed by the United States government, to deliver hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles of mineral water to villages in Azad Kashmir. Meanwhile his own people — who prevailed in this dispute, as they have in so many — were busy building water-delivery pipes and tanks on a local level. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/books/10book.html
Peon Peetie
9 April 2010 10:55am UTC
i've been much more aware about bottled water since watching that. i feel like i knew everything they said, but for some reason, the video was very effective.
i wonder how it compares to glass bottle production? sigh. consumption can be so consuming. it's exhausting.