PSA: Fill your own damn water bottle.

[elfs]

This afternoon I watched as a vendor came through our office and restocked our company coolers with a variety of sugared waters-- as well as ordinary bottles of water. It surprises me that we buy bottled water when we also have a filtered tap in the kitchen, and it surprises me even more when I realized that each liter bottle costs upwards of a dollar each to purchase, and that's before calculating in the delivery costs that come after production.

Compare that $1 a liter to the $0.0011 per liter for water from the tap. For those of us living in Seattle, there's absolutely no excuse for bottled water: the water from the tap is likely to be cleaner.

Of every penny above that 0.1¢ perhaps a quarter of it goes to the profit of the bottler. The rest is consumed in two ways: the menial efforts of others, and in oil. The bottle is made of petrochemicals, and it costs truck time to transport the bottles from the bottler to the point of purchase. Given that most Western countries have evolved this incredibly energy-efficient mechanism for delivering water to every non-rural home and office, there is almost no excuse for buying bottled water. If you want to save gas and oil, reduce pollution, and save the planet, here's a cheap, easy and probably better-for-you step: fill your own water bottle from the tap.

Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

As with other comments, the water where I live tastes - icky. Cooking with it is Ok, but just drinking it isn't refreshing. I do - when I take my morning pills I have cup in the bathroom and I just use a swig of tap water to wash them down. But I drink a lot of water (trying to cut down my soda - at home I drink water, sometimes Diet Coke with Splenda) and I have Poland Spring delivered. It tastes better, a lot better, and I like the convenience - I always have nicely chilled water on tap, no filters, pitchers in the fridge, etc. I also have instant hot water on tap, for instant oatmeal, cocoa, tea, etc. The 5-gallon jugs I get don't cost me that much, and the combined better quality and convenience is worth it to me.