What argument are we having? If people would drink the water out of the tap, or drink it out of a Nestle bottle, they're drinking the same amount of water. Bottled water may be inefficient of other resources, may cause pollution, but it doesn't waste water.
I don't get this outrage over Nestle bottle water. The amount of water that is bottled for human consumption must be minuscule compared with many other usages like household, agricultural and industrial.
Furthermore, it is not like the water is wasted. It is actual consumed by humans who live not too far from the place where the water was bottled.
If nestle's water consumption is producing bottled water, and you assume people don't dump bottled water down the drain that often, then all of that consumption is going into human bodies, isn't it?
I buy bottled water as a drink on the go. I'm perfectly happy drinking tap water that's been bottled. If I've got the choice between a fizzy drink or water, I usually prefer water, thanks.
When I was a kid in the 80s there used to be public water fountains, now there aren't. I think we're all a little more germ paranoid these days too, so i doubt people would even use them if given a choice to buy a bottle of water for a £1 or use a fountain for free.
I mean the guy argues against himself:
Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy production, the bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage
The only thing I wish was better was that it wasn't plastic bottles, but I always recycle them if I can.
At the risk of continuing off-topic, the "outrage" over Nestle bottled water in this case was due to Nestle starting to draw large amounts of water at about 1/100th the residential water cost from an region under mandatory water restrictions due to drought. Blame Nestle and/or the local government, but it does seem short-sighted and suboptimal.
In general, though, bottled water isn't consumed close to its generation point: it's packaged in plastic bottles and trucked away. There's an environmental cost. And many of the bottles that are consumed locally contain the same water people could have gotten straight from the tap, so the environmental cost is lower but more pointless.
I think it's strange to not make that comparison. We accept the utility of bottled soda but not bottled water? What kind of fucked up consumerist world do you live in?
OK, I'm sure there are counter-examples to just about ever rule. However I think it's accurate to say that the vast majority of the population buy bottled water for the water, not the bottles. My point stands.
Opinion pieces like this one generally frame the choice as “bottled water” vs “water from tap.” For me, these don’t compete. I buy a bottle of water when I’m on the go and want a portable drink. There isn’t a faucet in my car, or in a park, or on the street. Indeed I know the bottle of water probably came from a faucet.
If there weren’t bottled water I wouldn’t drink from the tap instead. I would buy a bottle of something less healthy, like Coke.
Regarding the other responses to your comments - it only show how disconnected the practice of buying bottled water is from any real benefits. I live in a city where tap water is held to higher health standards than bottled water, and people still buy the bottles.
The bottled water is produced close to where it's sold. The issue is in countries where the water bottling plant takes up lots of the available local water so the poorer citizens can't access it, and they can't afford the bottled water either. This means they don't have access to any clean water.
One of Nestle's recent CEOs actually went on record to say say he didn't believe access to clean water should be a human right.
I'll buy that it's the top seller, but are the majority of bottled drinks water? Because when I go to a convenience store there is usually one fridge for bottled water and several for all the other stuff (soda, tea, juice, Gatorade etc).
I don't think all of that really matters anyway, because the point I'm making is: anything that's bad about a plastic bottle filled with water surely must be just as bad for a plastic bottle filled with water and a little bit of sugar and coloring. Nobody has really addressed this, and I just think it's strange.
I'm fine with the idea that we should address this by drinking tap water instead of bottled water. All I'm saying is that surely the same goes for other bottled drinks as well.
'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'
And?
How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?
Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals for consumption?
Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?
This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the choice of battles to fight seems goofy.
Almonds, meat, and golf courses are exorbitant consumers of water which no one needs to survive. You absolutely need water to survive.
One liter of bottled water requires 1 liter of water. One liter of almond milk requires 384. It is absurd that you justify almost 400x water consumption because "at least we get almonds".
I live in Florida. The amount of water I need is independent of bottles. If I drink a gallon of water from a pipe or bottle, I take a gallon of water out of the springs. If I drink a gallon of almond milk, I take 400 gallons from somewhere in California.
Your argument against plastic applies to almost all other things in grocery stores. The argument is specifically applied to water because everyone seems to have a personal grudge against Nestle.
Is bottled water wasteful? Yes. Should we dedicate more energy towards 400x wasteful activities in the same grocery store? Only if you want to be taken seriously.
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