Water crisis

Companies selling bottled water always like to claim that their water is pure, all-natural, safe to drink, and bottled at the source, which is always some clean mountain spring in a faraway place. Naturally, we all buy into it, because who can argue with the gorgeous TV commercials and the fact that the water always looks so crystal-clear in their plastic containers?

Wait, plastic containers? That alone should have clued us in long ago to the fact that pure, refreshing mineral water isn’t all that it says it is. An article on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer talks about the dirty truth.

More than 8 billion gallons of bottled water is consumed annually in the U.S. — an 8-ounce glass per person per day — representing $11 billion in sales. The Earth Policy Institute estimated that to make the plastic for the bottles burns up something like 1.5 million barrels of oil, enough to power 100,000 cars for a year. Nearly 90 percent of the bottles are not recycled.

Ugh.

Getting a water filter seems like a good idea, except here in my district, tap water often looks and smells tainted, and I can’t imagine it going through any filtration process that could convince me that it is indeed safe to drink.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.