A new reason to stop drinking bottled water: Recession

July 4th, 2008
in

A recent USA Today story headline: Feeling thrifty, the thirsty reach for tap, not bottle

Reported by Tali Arbel, AP Business Writer
Tap water is making a comeback.

With a day's worth of bottled water — the recommended 64 ounces — costing hundreds to thousands of dollars a year depending on the brand, more people are opting to drink water that comes straight from the sink.

The lousy economy may be accomplishing what environmentalists have been trying to do for years: wean people off the disposable plastic bottles of water that were sold as stylish, portable, healthier and safer than water from the tap.

We'd rather not see our fellow citizens' suffering be the reason for positive change in social behavior.  But if we want to see real change, we will need a political and economic framework for understanding how we can make change, and not just react to circumstances.

The USA Today article goes on:

Measured in 700-milliliter bottles of Poland Spring, a daily intake of water would cost $4.41, based on prices at a CVS drugstore in New York. Or $6.36 in 20-ounce bottles of Dasani. By half-liters of Evian, that'll be $6.76. All of which adds up to thousands a year.

Even a 24-pack of half-liter bottles at Costco Wholesale, a bargain at $6.97, would be consumed by one person in six days. That's more than $400 a year.

Compared to water from the tap? A little more than 0.001 cent for a day's worth of water. Based on averages from an American Water Works Association survey, that's just about 51 cents a year.

U.S. consumers spent $16.8 billion on bottled water in 2007, according to the trade publication Beverage Digest, up 12% from the year before. Yet it was the lowest growth rate since the early 1990s, said editor John Sicher.

 People will make decisions about consumption based on the cost of bottled water compared to the virtually free alternative that tap water provides, and that is inarguably a good thing. But we still need an economic framework that takes into account the true costs of commodities, and values both the natural resources from which they come and the downstream waste costs their consumption requires.  More than that, we need to restore the notion of "public good" and stop believing the lies that all private enterprise is good and all public activity somehow suspect.  After all, whose interests does that mythology serve?

costco watercostco waterEven bottled water at Costco, a bargain at $6.97, costs more than $400 a year, compared to tap water, which costs about 51 cents a year.

comments

Submitted by carpet sweeper (not verified) on Tue, 11/24/2009 - 11:10.
Bottled water became a booming business in the late 1990s. From 1997 to 2007, U.S. bottled water consumption per person almost doubled to 22.5 gallons, putting it behind only soft drinks among beverage segments, according to figures from Beverage Digest.Last year, though, bottled water consumption slipped to 21.4 gallons per person and growth was flat for most major brands. Nestle’s Pure Life brand leads the category with PepsiCo’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani a close second and third, respectively.Still beverages, which include bottled water and other noncarbonated drinks such as teas and juices, represented 22 percent of Coca-Cola’s case volume in 2008, but they’re becoming a bigger part of the overall portfolio. Between 2008 and 2020 across the industry, Coca-Cola projects water to be the third-largest driver of global retail sales growth, behind carbonated soft-drinks and juices and juice drinks.

comments

Submitted by iron beds (not verified) on Fri, 11/13/2009 - 04:44.
I don't think there's a way to expand the internal capacity of the Time Capsule (other than actually swapping hard drives). However, you can connect an external USB hard drive to the Time Capsule and use that as your backup location. Unfortunately, you cannot use Time Machine with both the Time Capsule's internal storage and the external hard drive at the same time on the same Mac. That is to say, Time Machine can only backup your Mac to a single drive at a time. So what you could do is hook up a larger external (e.g. 2GB) hard drive to the Time Capsule and make that the backup disk. In that situation, though, the internal Time Capsule disc would go unused by Time Machine. Nonetheless, you could still use it as Network Attached Storage.

comments

Submitted by berber carpet (not verified) on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 05:32.
It is a common misconception for many people that bottled water is safer than tap, plastic bottles get recycled, and no harm is being done to the environment in the bottling process. Unfortunately, that could not be further from the truth! So in case you either needed more reasons to stop drinking bottled water, or a few extra talking points when discussing with your friends, I have assembled 12 solid reasons to kick the bottled water habit: