Low effort, high impact

This is a bit off topic, but I’d like rant a bit about bottled water, of all things.  It has always seemed like bottled water was both an obvious marketing trick and a huge environmental disaster.   My impression has long been that corporations take what is basically tap water, and in some instances literally tap water, and sell it to us at hundreds or thousands of times the cost.  An obvious rip off.  Even worse it has to have an enormous negative environmental impact.  Manufacturing plastic, pumping, bottling, shipping, stocking, refrigerating and disposing, all for what?  For a convenient on-the-go disposable container?  Because it tastes fresher?  I’m not at the forefront of green initiatives, not by a long shot, but this one just seems so obvious that anyone who is and environmental advocate has to be enraged.  But it never seemed to bother anyone else. 

Well, the other day I watched the documentary Tapped.  Finally, a comprehensive overview of the bottled water industry that confirmed my suspicions and detailed even more reasons why it’s a bad idea. From pumping water out communities while they are experiencing droughts, to BPA poisoning, to swirling Texas sized plastic storms in the oceans there’s something for everybody. 

There are difficult problems to solve when it comes to environmental policy, replacing the internal combustion engine for instance.  But drinking clean regulated tap water instead of bottled water doesn’t seem like such a sacrifice, but somehow I bet it is.