Liberal Debutante

A bottle is just a bottle? Not when it’s being filled with tap water and sold… then it’s a bottle that is leaking chemicals into your water, selling for a ridiculous price and not being recycled. I was reading this month’s MacLean’s magazine and there is a big article in it about bottled water. The magazine sports quotes such as:

“Toting a natural resource that costs more than gasoline in a mottle destined to clog a landfill doesn’t exactly telegraph eco-cred”

“There’s mounting evidence that these containers are leaching toxins into the bererages we’re drinking and our children are drinking”

“There’s empirical evidence that these plastic ingredients are now in the bodies of every citizen … I am quite sure that a few years from now we will look back at these toxins and shake our heads and wonder ‘What the heck were we thinking?’ ”

“An estimated 88% of water bottles are not recycled. According to the Environment and Plastics Industry Council, Canadians sent 65 000 tonnes of PET beverage containers, many of them water bottles, to landfills or incineration in 2002.”

W.T.F.

Nearly 1 out of every 5 people in Canada drink bottled water exclusively. …another 3 out of every 5 drinking it once in a while. The United Church is calling for a ban on bottled water, not often do I side with a church.. .but I find myself siding with the United Church of Canada more often than not.

“If you’ve got $100 to spend on groceries each week, we don’t want people buying into some subliminal message that the water in their taps isn’t safe and that . . . they have to be spending $10 to $15 on a couple of cases of bottled water. In fact, they’re paying for their water twice. They’re buying that bottled water and they’re also paying taxes for water — crazy, if you’re on a limited income.”

Besides that I found out from my mom today that Nestle simply bottles the exact same water that the entire City of Guelph gets out of their taps, years ago Coke-A-Cola admitted that Dasani was simply tap water, as well. So why do people do it? The answer is simple - it’s a life style choice.

Bottled water such as Bling H20 is simply cool to carry around. Girls like to walk around university with bottled water so that people know she is exacerbating herself to the point where she must drink water all day. On the Bling H20 website they state that you can tell “a lot” about a person from the type of water they carry… Which is very true. People who carry Bling H20 are idiots, people who carry Nalgene’s full of tap water are hippies, and Madonna carries only blessed water. It’s a weird weird world. Last year the United States alone spent $11 billion drinking 8.3 gallons of bottled water. The average American consumed 28 gallons of their favorite brand comprising of up to $100 billion dollars for the global market of bottled water.

The price of the water is incredible. The new limited edition of Cobalt Bling costs over $500 for a case of 12. This really shows the power of marketing. You place a jeweled bottle on a girls photoshopped ass and you can charge $500 for water. A single serving of bottled water costs 1 - 2 dollars, depending on where you get it, the same amount of water from the tap costs a fraction of this. The Natural resources Defense Council in the US has estimated that, depending on the brand, bottled water costs 240 to 10 000 times the price of tap water… and this is for water that Coke and Pepsi just take out of their taps. Canone and Nestle just take it right out of the ground water. These companies are also not required by law to disclose the geographical location or source of their water.

Many people will say that bottled water is superior to tap water because it’s cleaner - but more and more peer reviewed journals are finding that there are disturbing amounts of toxic ingredients in water such as arsenic and mercury in bottled water. Again picking on Dasani, Coke had to retract nearly 1/2 a million bottles due to a bromate contamination. The NRCD ran a study with the following findings:

NRDC’s study included testing of more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. While most of the tested waters were found to be of high quality, some brands were contaminated: about one-third of the waters tested contained levels of contamination — including synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic — in at least one sample that exceeded allowable limits under either state or bottled water industry standards or guidelines.

Bottled water is just so pointless. If it’s going to continue to be used, it should at least be different than what comes out of our taps. There should be stricter regulations and information readily available for what has gone into it, what tests have been made and why, exactly, it is so much better than what is coming out of our taps. And just as there is in BC - EVERYWHERE there should be deposit charges made on bottles! Then when you return them or recycle them you get some money back for the bottle. I think in BC it’s only $0.05 but it should be like $1.00 to give people more incentive to do it.

Don’t drink bottled water. …Really don’t drink Bling h20, if you do… you’re an idiot.