Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect, writes this month in Fast Company about our love of bottled water, which he says “is not a benign indulgence.”
Check out this quote:
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.
That is what a sticky idea sounds like. I felt my brain squirm when I read that paragraph. I think Fishman may have single-handedly shamed me into giving up bottled water. You?
Dan,
Hope all is well, great post. That is exactly the sort of succinctness and clarity social causes must employ.
And in Evian…
In the Alps, nobody would buy bottled water, except for babies/sensitive persons for who Alpine water’s high mineral content is laxative.
Also people would buy bottles of “Eau de Source” so they can refill them to go ski.
Otherwise the tap water comes out of the tap almost freezing in the winter: much tastier than drinking from plastic.
Yup, all those little plastic bottles come from/go to somewhere. I carry small nalgene bottle. Starbucks will fill it with very good filtered water for free.
When my duaghter was home from college one summer, we were at the gracery store & she grabbed a case of bottles water & I explained the value of grabbing a gallon & refilling a bottle. She whinned & protested.
I was with her later that year at college & went shopping (when she paid). When I asked her about the gallon of water she grabbed istead of a case of bottles, she just grinned.
Real descisions happen when you actually have to pay the real price.
i have begun my fast from bottled water…
Oh my gosh, I’m starting a new boutique bottled water company called “San Fransemite”. I just need to buy a couple truckloads of bottles (made from recycled plastic, of course) with labels then fill with S.F. tap water. I’ll operate it like a microbrewery and sell it in an eco-friendly store for $2.50 a bottle to green yuppies, who I’ll draw in by donating $0.10 a bottle to save the wildlife and drawing attention to the fact that Starbucks is exploiting third-world farmers who grow their beans. I’ll report back later this year when I make my first million…
heh. you wonder if the problem wasn’t simply the order of invention. if we’d always been drinking bottled water, and then along came an entrepreneur who said, “i’ll give you all the Yosemite water you can drink — you just turn a crank like this and it’ll flow freely RIGHT THERE IN YOUR HOUSE,” don’t you think we could sell a kitchen sink for $20-30k? especially if Viking made them.
I’m health conscious, so please pardon my opinion here. Sure, the water is very likely to be ultra clean, pristine, and filled with minerals. It may even beat the quality of Fiji “artesian water from the paradise” Water. However, how about the quality of “the messenger” of that Yosemite originated SF tap water? Those pipes, I mean.
I would assume the water originating from the Yosemite Valley is some of the best in the world, but I would think that that the houses in SF built pre 1978 with older plumbing would contain lead based solder. The lower the PH of the water, the more “aggresive” it is therefore being a better solvent. Nothing a good NSF certified Point of Use water filter couldn’t take care of. The bottled water ban though is a bit much.
i suspect they sample the water randomly at different end-locations, precisely for that reason. water-purity experts, fill us in!
Weird, I blogged about this excellent article on the 6th and I picked the exact same quote to emphasize. I guess this is proof that you are right: it’s sticky!