Bottled water vs. the environment
March 11, 2008
Bottled water is the target of environmental campaigns in the U.K as well as the U.S. My namesake, the Nestlé Corporation, appears to be under particular attack. Acording to the British government, tap water “requires 300 times less energy than bottled water and does not create bottled packaging waste.” I wonder how the company plans to rebut that argument.
Sadly, they will rebut it by spending 300x more money then the governments on advertising/lobbying a completely different thing and try and change the subject….
Just a guess…
Comment by Mark D. — March 11, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
Interesting. I always thought the tap water in Europe was mostly undrinkable. Is it perhaps different in the UK? or am I just misinformed?
Comment by Karen — March 11, 2008 @ 5:38 pm
If I can’t drink bottled water because it isn’t green and I can’t drink tap water because it’s contaminated with drugs and tastes of chlorine, what am I left with? Coke?
Comment by Robin — March 11, 2008 @ 11:59 pm
Karen: I’m afraid you are misinformed… I’m French and I have had tap water in almost all EU countries. It’s fine.
We also have electricity and shower daily
Comment by Charlotte — March 12, 2008 @ 7:54 am
But there are drugs in my tap water:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/10/pharma.water1.ap/index.html
So if they’re going to get miffed at Nestle, they’re really going to have get a little more Brita action going for tap water. Of course, Lord knows what drugs may be in bottled water, they haven’t tested it, so yeah, I’m guessing I’m stuck with Snapple.
Comment by Jenn — March 12, 2008 @ 8:28 am
Robin, you have a good point there. If not tap water or bottled water then what?
Since much of the bottled water, at least that sold in the US, is just purified tap water, you could just purchase a good filter and filter your tap water to remove chlorine and other chemicals that were either missed by the filtration plant or were picked up somewhere between exiting the plant and going into your glass.
It just takes a tremendous amount of energy to ship water from whatever far-off place it is bottled, to produce the bottles, and many of those bottles are not recycled. I think everyone wins when you re-use water bottles, cleaning them out and refilling them with filtered tap water.
Comment by Daniel Ithaca,NY — March 12, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
Bottled Water may be the new Water Rights issue:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100797_pf.html
http://www.stopcorporateabusenow.org/campaign/nestle_no_more_sweetheart_deals
Comment by Fentry — March 13, 2008 @ 5:51 pm