blog.thequonk.com » water bottle http://blog.thequonk.com Just another WordPress weblog Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 No Evian for me, please http://blog.thequonk.com/2008/06/30/no-evian-for-me-please/ http://blog.thequonk.com/2008/06/30/no-evian-for-me-please/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:00:55 +0000 Karen http://blog.thequonk.com/?p=12 Did you know that 2.5 million bottles are thrown away every hour in the United States? That’s a lot of bottles. How many bottles did you contribute to the pile? Watch The 11th Hour Press Conference with Leonardo DiCaprio on YouTube, they stray into the topic when one of them starts talking about personal action. I’m not a big fan of water, they all taste different to me–some good, some bad–but when I did drink water, it was usually out of a bottle. I’m also guilty of using plastic soda bottles, plastic juice bottles and glass juice bottles. It’s something I definitely have to change. In fact, I just bought myself a new Bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) Nalgene bottle. There are some Nalgene bottles in the storage room but I’m pretty sure they were bought before we learnt that BPA is toxic.

David Suzuki wrote a great article that Canoe published about water bottles and the environment. Alongside other things, I learnt that Dasani and Aquafina are bottles of repackaged tap water. I’ve heard that Dasani was, I never knew that Aquafina was. So we’re paying a company to sell us tap water we could get at home. I like how our logic is so off-the-mark. Btw, Dasani tastes gross. I don’t think I’ve ever had Aquafina before though. Did you know…

It takes close to 17 million barrels of oil to produce the 30 billion water bottles that U.S. citizens go through every year. Or, as the National Geographic website illustrates it: “Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.” It also takes more water to produce a bottle than the bottle itself will hold.

That’s what Suzuki writes in his article. After reading that, I decided to go over to the National Geographic website and found an article on “7 Misconceptions About Plastics and Plastic Recycling“.

What can we do to ease the pain? First, we can stop using those one-time disposable bottles: Evian, Fiji, Perrier, Coke, Fruitopia, SoBe, and all those other ones. Change your container like a hard-plastic (BPA-free) Nalgene bottle, a metallic SIGG bottle, or if you really can’t get away with disposables try BIOTA Spring Water in a compostable container. The BIOTA Spring Water container is made from corn though, I don’t think the humanitarians approve of it (?). Drink filtered water using a Brita Water Filtration System or one of those filter-under-the-sink versions or filter-on-the-tap versions. If you think it lacks flavour, try one of those flavour crystal things. Go for the big containers instead of those single packs. I’ll get back to you on that… I don’t know which ones more harmful for the environment: little single-serving, crystal-flavour packets or big canisters of multiple servings.

Buy a reusable container and ditch the French water.

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