When it comes to budgeting, you can’t get much worse than bottled water.
If your home is connected to “city water” then each sip you take from the plastic Flask-o-Fluid bought at WalMart costs between 1,000 and 10,000 times as much as a sip from your kitchen tap. (Per gallon, bottled water costs $1 to $10, city water about one-tenth of a cent.) Plus you pay the indirect cost of landfilling the bottle which, let’s be realistic, will not get recycled.
Such ridiculously wasteful behavior drives some folks crazy. Including me.
The system of water treatment and distribution that we take for granted is the result of more than a century of scientific, technical, financial and political improvements. These have created what would have been regarded as an unimaginable miracle during the first 99% of human history: Clean water available for free almost everywhere without any effort.
This miracle should be celebrated, not avoided. New Hampshire will be celebrating it Wednesday as part of the annual Drinking Water Festival in Rochester, part of the American Waterworks Association’s national Drinking Water Week. Among other things it will include a taste test of tap water from various New Hampshire water systems. Concord has won the contest among various state water systems five times since 2016 and I bet they’ll be irritated if they don’t win again this year.
The festival will be held at the Rochester Drinking Water Facility at 64 Stratford Road (Route 202A) between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. The event, which is also billed as a Science Fair, will include lots of technical and environmental information about freshwater systems, much of it in kid-friendly form.
Hopefully that event will make some people pause and ask why they ignore public water and spend unnecessary money on the exact same thing, especially since the packaging for that exact same thing is a disaster. One study estimated that it takes 17 million barrels of oil to make the plastic bottles that hold the 8 billion-plus gallons of bottled water that Americans slurp each year.
At the risk of sounding like a wild-eyed radical, I think I know the culprit: the profit motive.
When I was a kid bottled water was a minor luxury, associated with hoity-toity types who sipped Perrier to remind everybody that they had vacationed in France. You almost never saw it in everyday life.
But then some executives looking for ways to “enhance shareholder value” realized they could make a fortune if they could convince people to buy this cheap, ubiquitous product from them instead of from municipal water departments. Using the unparalleled energy of capitalism they went to work and, boy oh boy, have they succeeded.
We’ve been swamped with decades of ads for this overpriced drink to convince us that it’s somehow better than the free version. Since water is water the ads have to be, shall we say, imaginative. Companies don’t talk about taste any more, they talk about such non-existent attributes as “a proprietary process that stabilizes oxygen in the water” and “restructured molecules to provide extra hydration for the body.” And yes, those are real claims for bottled water.
In a particularly clever twist the industry has somehow inserted that word “hydration” into common parlance. Nobody says “I am thirsty” anymore, because that implies you could satisfy yourself with any old liquid. People say “I need to get hydrated,” which sounds more modern and therefore is linked to the modern beverage of corporate-provided water.
Worst of all, they cast aspersions on city water using ominous-looking photos of pipe interiors and reiteration of words like “contaminated.” They never explain why you should trust a private company hiding behind proprietary data to give you safer water than a local government division which is open to public scrutiny.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that public water fountains have started to disappear. In my youth you could find one in virtually any public space, but they’re getting rarer. You can, however, always find vending machines selling 47 varieties of water and water-ish products in eye-catching plastic bottles. With extra hydration and stabilized molecules!
So in honor of Drinking Water Week, grab a nice refreshing quaff from your kitchen tap or garden hose. And think about how much money you just saved.
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