What's worse, like as not, that bottled water is no more pure, perhaps less so, than the water from your tap. And taste? In taste tests, people almost always pick the tap water over the bottled.
Between 10 and 15 percent of the price of a bottle of water goes to cover advertising costs. We not only buy their myths, it turns out we pay extra for them.
Why do we buy bottled water, anyway?
The idea that bottled water not only tastes better but is safer to drink came from, (Guess who!), Madison Avenue. That's right. Leonard says these are just two of the myths we've been sold to get us to carry around our very own bah-bahs, sucking on them like babies everywhere we go. Not that drinking water isn't important to our health and well-being. Conventional wisdom has it that we need eight glasses of the pure, sparkling stuff every day.Half a billion bottles a week in U.S. alone
But do we need to contribute half a billion bottles every week to the waste stream? That's the U.S. number--enough to circle the globe five times. Every. Single. Week. All plastic. (Reminder: Every piece of plastic ever manufactured exists today.)Get the whole story here, in Leonard's inimitable style, sure to draw a belly laugh or two.
This is just one of the reasons I carry a refillable water bottle. It's a conscious choice, and it helps bring us just a little closer to a sustainable lifestyle, and a healthy planet, more like the world of Ordinary.
What do you think? Are you carrying your own reusable bottle these days? What other conscious choices are you making to assure we leave the Earth a little better than we found it?
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We make peace in a million small ways every day.
All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.
2 comments:
yep, I carry a stainless steel bottle... when I bother at all. Turns out that the urgent hype around 'how much' water we need, and the awfulness of a moments! gasp! dehydration - is all inaccurate too. I'd been suspicious. Funny that I survived my childhood without constantly drinking water, as did all of my family before me. Hummm. Now - when I'm thirsty, I drink. If I'll be out a long time, I grab my water bottle. But without it in my hand every minute, I don't drink as much as I used to. And science has also confirmed that 'oh, yes. that IS water in tea /food/etc., and it DOES hydrate you after all. It doesn't HAVE to be all water, all the time.'
Amazing how we allow ourselves to be lulled into accepting that crap without wondering how our species survived without bottled water.
I'm with you, Hayden. The whole dehydration/rehydration thing goes back and forth depending on who's funding the study, doesn't it? Except in summertime, when I'm a walking rain machine, I never manage the eight glasses a day we're supposed to drink. I feel like I'm sloshing with water when I try to down that much. Thanks for checking in.
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