Is it tastier? In taste tests across the country, people consistently choose tap over bottled water.
THE STORY OF BOTTLED WATER
kitchen? Bottled water costs about 2000 times more than tap water.
Can you imagine paying 2000 times the price of anything else? How about a $10,000 sandwich? Yet people in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week. That’s enough to circle the globe more than 5 times. How did this come to be? Well it all goes back to how our materials economy works and one of its key drivers which is known as manufactured demand.
If companies want to keep growing, they have to keep selling more and more stuff. In the 1970's giant soft drink companies got worried as their growth projections started to level off.
There’s only so much soda a person can drink. Plus it wouldn’t be long before people began realizing that soda is not that healthy and turned back to drinking tap water.
Well, the companies found their next big idea in a silly designer product that most people laughed at as a passing yuppie fad. Water is free, people said back then, what will they sell us next, air? So how do you get people to buy this fringe product? Simple: You manufacture demand. How do you do that? Well, imagine you’re in charge of a bottled water company.
Since people aren’t lining up to trade their hard earned money for your unnecessary product, you make them feel scared and insecure if they don’t have it. And that’s exactly what the bottled water industry did. One of their first marketing tactics was to scare people about tap water, with ads like Fiji’s Cleveland campaign. They’re trashing the environment all along the product’s life cycle. Exactly how is that environmentally responsible?
The problems start here with extraction and production where oil is used to make water bottles.
Each year, making the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars.
All that energy spent to make the bottle even more to ship it around the planet and then we drink it in about 2 minutes? That brings us to the big problem at the other end of the life cycle – disposal.
It’s time we took back the tap.
That starts with making a personal commitment to not buy or drink bottled water unless the water in your community is truly unhealthy. Yes, it takes a bit of foresight to grab a reusable bottle on the way out, but I think we can handle it. We know better now.
Protect your wallet, protect your health, protect your planet. ♥
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Source from: storyofstuffproject
