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By chance, I recieved two articles reporting on bottled water bans in schools today – one about a Catholic school board in Canada and another about universities in the United States. The breadth of this bottled water backlash was impressive: both religious and secular, national and international, collegiate and primary/secondary, and coastal and heartland: Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic School District in Ontario, Canada, Washington University, Brandeis University, Evergreen State College in Washington, and the University of Arkansas.
This does not appear to be a regional fad that is going to fade. Increasingly, educational institutions are joining municipalities in rejection of bottled water and the extreme wastefulness and disconnection from nature that it symbolizes. Dramatic comments posted in opposition to these bans show how polarizing the issue can be and have sparked the following insights from my year of dedication to this pursuit.
Bottled water may not be the gravest problem in our midst and banning it may not be the best approach, but getting people back to drinking tap water is an important positive step toward sustainable living. It is essential for our survival on this planet to start questioning and changing our wasteful habits — drinking bottled water is just one small example of where we have gone wrong. It is an important but easy step people can take on the path to reducing their eco-footprints, but hardly the last. Once a person reduces their consumption of bottled water, they are likely to re-consider many of the other disposable convenience items they consume daily.
Most importantly, when we drink tap water, we are connnected with our environment. Suddenly, we are concerned about where our tap water comes from and what’s in it. We realize that we have to take care of our watershed because we are dependant on it. We tend to think we can live disconnected from nature or by conquering nature, but ultimately we can’t. Let’s get Back2Tap so that we consume fewer resources, reduce our waste and care for our watersheds.
To be perfectly honest, giving up bottled water was a no-brainer for me because I was always too frugal, practical, and lazy to bother with it. I never enjoyed spending money for plain water, hauling pallets of it home, storing it (where?), and having to recycle the empty bottles. It made so much more sense to just drink tap water. The other thing is, I drink mostly seltzer water, and much to the shock of my friends and family who think of me as a very health- and eco-conscious person, an occasional diet cola. I have to admit I guiltily kept buying these products long after I swore off regular bottled water because I didn’t know there was any option other than abstinence.
My husband came to the rescue and gave me a Soda Club seltzer and soda maker on Christmas in 2007. I was skeptical at first. Would the water be fizzy enough? Would it cost more? How much space would it take up? How would we get replacement CO2 tanks? What are the plastic bottles made of?
It is a fabulous machine. The selzer is as fizzy as you choose to make it, it saves us around $250/year, it takes up about the same amount of space as a blender, the CO2 tanks are picked up and delivered from our front steps free of charge (in groups of three), and the reusable bottles are made of a safe, BPA-free plastic.
I don’t miss hauling 7 two-liter bottles home from the grocery store each week. Beyond convenience and economy, our eco-footprint has been reduced, too. By eliminating 365 disposable plastic seltzer bottles, I estimate that we are saving 50 gallons of oil, 400 gallons of water, and 200 pounds of greenhouse gases each year.
Since seeing the movie FLOW (see my December 4, 2008 post), I haven’t been as keen to drink commercial sodas, on principal. I can’t stomach contributing to their profits. Thankfully, the Soda Club machine can make an array of regular and diet sodas for those days I need an extra treat. It’s a big hit with kids, too.
