Can the planet afford so much bottled water?
This post was triggered after reading an interview in the New York Times featuring Kim E. Jeffery, CEO of Nestle Waters (owner of brands like Poland Spring and Perrier). This is also the first in a series of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Activism posts - it’s about small things you can do to make a much better world out there.
The health conscious and the thirsty on-the-go may be opting more and more for bottled water, but imagine the colossal amount of plastic waste it is adding in the landfills.
Ok, we all drink bottled water for various reasons – most justified – but there can be ways to reduce if not eliminate this waste altogether. Environmentalists have been targeting bottled water companies but we cannot expect them to stop selling at the expense of their business interests. Here are some suggestions to make a difference:
- Drink tap water. If its purity is in doubt, install a filter. These are good enough for the water supply in most countries.
- On the move? Cannot carry the tap with you? Or walk into a TGIF and ask for tap water? Keep some refillable bottles at home – and carry these with you in your car or bag. I do that – it’s quite easy to do this.
- Still end up buying bottled water sometimes? Don’t throw the bottle away. Tak eit home to refill.
- Got more bottles than you need? If the bottling company has a policy to take these back, do that. If not, write to them and urge them to have a system to take these back for recycling. In the meantime, see if there is any organization who take these to recycle. Try to follow a ‘No bottles in the bin’ policy.
- Improve council/municipal water supply. Let us not focus on just Nestle or Pepsico bashing – direct your energies to ensure water supplied in taps is of better quality. Write to your local governments/ councils and get citizens to come together as pressure group. This alone can make a big difference to your need to go for bottled water.
Makes sense? Saving some money in the process? Treat yourself. Or buy some trees. How do you do that? Will tell you in a future post.
Yes, this all makes sense. I live in Mexico, a country where bottled water has become ubiquitous in the last ten years perhaps. And it is painfully clear for all to see - Guadalajara, the city where I was born and grew up, is teeming with empty plastic water and soda bottles strewn liberally throughout the entire urban landscape, on sidewalks, streets, medians, parks, and even up in trees, floating in lakes, rivers, stuck into every available hole in a wall or a tree.
This makes me sad and angry. People just don’t take the trouble to dispose of them, or better yet, recycle them properly. And I don’t entirely blame them. There are no facilities around to make this easier. No garbage or recycling bins anywhere (if there are, they are filled to the brim with debris and trash never to be emptied). People seem to be too involved with trying to survive in an ever increasingly hostile and polluted city to give a damn, to make the extra effort to hold on to this garbage while they get to an adequate venue of disposal. I ask - what about the water companies that sell these things in the first place? Mexico used to be a country of reuse. If you bought a soda (water wasn’t sold in bottled until recently) you would drink the liquid and then return the bottle, or pay a deposit and take it home. And THEN return the bottle. Companies decided it was more profitable to sell water and sodas in disposable (”recyclable” they say) containers. And many do get recycled. But I feel that companies should be responsible to what happens to this junk after it gets sold and consumed. The system used to work, and it was the companies that made sure it did. They should not leav it up to ordinary citizens to take care of this problem. The government is also shamefully incapable of doing anything. After all, isn’t it the companies that are making a profit from this? Aren’t they the ones that decided to do things this way?