Opinion: Bottled water makes less sense in a drought
By Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times
As California’s drought really starts to bite — the mandatory water use restrictions approved by the state last week are just the beginning — questions are bound to be raised about the indescribably wasteful use of water to retail bottlers.
The sale of bottled water to most Americans, who have access to cheap and safe tap water from municipal systems, is a marketing scam, and environmentally devastating besides. As Peter H. Gleick of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute showed in 2007, it took the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to produce the plastic bottles for American buyers in 2006. That would be enough to fuel 1 million American cars and light trucks for a year.
“Bottled water requires energy throughout its life cycle,” Gleick has written. “Energy is required to capture, treat, and send water to the bottling plant; fill, package, transport, and cool the bottled water; and recycle or dispose of the empty containers.”
Consider the unnecessary energy usage in shipping, say, Fiji Water to these shores from a Pacific island dictatorship 5,000 miles away, all to satisfy the marketing thirst of the product’s distributors, Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Beverly Hills. And while you’re cradling that shiny square bottle in your hands, keep in mind that 30 percent of Fiji’s 800,000 residents don’t have access to clean drinking water themselves.
I have never understood the popularity of plastic bottled water. It is not environmentally clean, and arguably may have health problems from plastic containers. Clearly making and disposing of the containers is not a good use of energy or resources. The filters available today produce water of better quality than the often filtered tap water consumers buy by the case.
I live in Nevada in a neighborhood where there’s no government supplied water, so I depend on a well. If you know Nevada, most wells also deliver arsenic – when I’ve checked our water it’s hovered on both sides of the federal limits for arsenic in publicly delivered water.
We have a reverse osmosis filtration system which is questionable in dealing with arsenic, but water for drinking or packing along on a hike or a run comes exclusively from bottles. All of which I recycle, regardless of there not being any financial incentive to do so.
I have no guilt about our use of bottled water, but I’d encourage others to be a bit less self righteous about their opposition to it.
A fine example of our free enterprise system at work. While the bottlers have a great marketing program to promote their product, it is still up to the consumer to choose whether (or not) to purchase it, even how much they are willing to pay. Business is business.
Some of us have medical reasons for why we must have access to purified bottled water when we’re away from home. (In my case, it’s an allergy to most forms of added fluoride, which is present in many, if not most, municipal water systems.)
I agree that bottled water is largely a rip-off, but *purified* bottled water is not. Not for me.
Tahoe water straight out of the tap is great! We don’t buy bottled water except some set aside for emergencies. A good solution to the bottled water debate is to fill a camping type water container with Tahoe water. No waste of plastic in a reusable container, just good well water from a local source.
OLS