The Columnist Manifesto

When I was young, the idea of buying bottled water as one’s regular source of drinking water was absurd. Bottled water was for stocking a tornado shelter, or for driving across the desert, or for when the water-well pump for the family that wasn’t on the city water system broke down.

Americans’ water-drinking habits have undergone a relatively quiet revolution. Somewhere along the line, broad swaths of the American public lost faith in the quality of tap water. I’m included in this. I’m not sure what it was – rumors of pollutants in public water reservoirs, or of bacteria or metallic residue in plumbing? In any case, a huge percentage of Americans now get most of their drinking water from bottled water. Don’t ask me for figures – you know it’s true. The bottled drinking water industry has exploded.

What drove this home for me was not the ubiquitous small plastic bottles of Poland Spring, Crystal Geyser and the Coke-and-Pepsi products, Dasani and Aquafina, respectively. It was the baseball steroid hearings before Congress. At the witness tables, next to the microphones in front of Mark McGwire, Raphael Palmiero, Sammy Sosa and Curt Schilling were not the traditional pitcher-and-water glass, the prop of the nervous congressional witness. There were small bottles of commercial bottled water. Yes, I know professional athletes are product-placement whores, but these were the halls of Congress, for gosh sakes! Bottled water has taken over.

So what that a commodity delivered free to apartment dwellers and at a nominal cost to homeowners is now widely eschewed in favor of the far more expensive bottled alternative?

An environmentalist friend of mine makes these very persuasive arguments. Check the facts out for yourself, but I’m going to try to cut way down on bottled water.

1. Something else to drill for. In addition to depleting watersheds and springs, the bottled water industry creates environmental impact by giving private industry yet another monetary incentive to tramp into wilderness areas and extract resources. Apparently, unlike oil drilling, there isn’t really any regulation in place to slow them down.

2. What makes us think the bottled water quality is so good? There are no regulations in place to ensure that bottled drinking water is in fact any “healthier” than tap water. In fact, a lot of bottled water is tap water, though it may go through extra distillation. Home filtrations systems may be the best way to deal privately with concerns about the quality of your tap water.

3. I have one word for you: plastics. The bottled water boom has been an incredible bonanza for the plastics industry. The plastic bottles, particularly the smaller ones, are extremely wasteful of resources; though technically recyclable, only a small percentage of plastic water bottles are recycled, and even most of those we dutifully put in recycling bins end up as trash -- put in landfill or even incinerated, thereby releasing toxins into the air.

4. Privatization. A massive middle-class exodus from the public drinking water system may reduce our social commitment to public drinking water quality. Drinking water supply may become a candidate for budget cutting. Result: poor water for poor people. Hence the title of this post.

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UPDATE: See the report at emagazine.com here for more details. (For the info on recycling, scroll down about 4/5 of the way to the heading "Big Footprint.")

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