September 12, 2007

Water, Water Everywhere

The portable bottle of water has become such a part of our culture that bags, briefcases, and even jackets are designed with special pockets to accommodate one. Some people never leave home without their Aquafina.

I'm from the Midwest, where we make do with what we've got, so my first encounter with bottled water wasn't until 1979, when we visited California from our small farm in Indiana. Starter Husband's L.A. cousin had his own water cooler, a stoneware jug with a spigot, that sat in the corner of the kitchen. My cousin-in-law claimed to have some secret knowledge about pollutants in Los Angeles tap water (not really such a wacky theory at the time) but it seemed to me that the water cooler was just a part of his California Cool vibe, along with his home-grown oregano and redwood hot tub.

I was used to well water, which was pumped up from an underground spring. It percolated through rock and clay and by the time it emerged from the kitchen faucet, it contained 300% of your daily recommended amount of sulfer. So, to me, the tap water in LA smelled like a swimming pool and tasted like a chlorine cocktail. I couldn't blame my cousin-in-law for disdaining the local brew; he was lucky he could afford to do so.

Keeper and I have never been rich enough or elitist enough to turn up our noses at tap water. Granted, sometimes we have to pinch our noses to gulp it down, but it does the job of keeping us hydrated and so far, hasn't killed us.

Now that bottled water is more expensive than gas and the planet is completely covered in discarded plastic water bottles, it's clear that something needs to be done about our bottled water habit.

In an ironic twist, local bureaucrats are trying to start a trend. In San Francisco, the coolest city on earth, local government employees are prohibited from buying bottled water with municipal funds. And in Palo Alto, which owns its own municipal utilities, including water, there is increasing peer pressure among city employees to drink their own product. Can the fashionistas be far behind?

The truth is, we may have been drinking tap water all along without knowing it. Some water companies simply fill their bottles from the tap, slap a fancy label on it and sell it to us for 1,000 times more than they pay for it. Now that consumers are catching on, water bottlers have invented new types of water-including vitamin water and fruit water-all of which can be replicated by dissolving a fruit-flavored chewable vitamin in a glass of tap water.

Except for the fact that one good earthquake will destroy the delivery system, there is nothing wrong with water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. The water itself is tasty and safe to drink. Which is more than you can say for that bottle of water that you keep in your car. Once you drink from it and introduce the bacteria from your mouth, the bottle becomes a veritable Petri dish. Studies show that after it has sat in your cup-holder in the hot sun for a while, all manner of microscopic organisms have incubated, hatched, and multiplied. You'd be better off drinking out of a garden hose after your Schnauzer has had his fill.

It's not really about the water, though. It's about the waste.

Take a look at your recycling. How many water bottles are in there? Now add in the number that you discarded at work or the gas station or left on a conference table somewhere. People who study these things tell us that only one quarter of the water bottles we buy are actually recycled. What's your percentage? Consider this: Americans buy 30 billion bottles of water every year. Three-quarters of those-more than 22 billion bottles every year-end up as roadside litter, as landfill, or as trash in the ocean.

Convinced yet? Then how about this fact: it takes fossil fuels-as in millions of gallons of crude oil-to manufacture the bottles and distribute them to consumers like us who have perfectly good water coming out of the tap.

If you want to carry water with you, get a sturdy plastic bottle, fill it with tap water, and go. Scrub it out every night and repeat. You'll save money, and perhaps, even the planet.