AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2008 > August > 11
Monday, August 11, 2008
Should we be buying bottled water?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
After running errands and playing on a friend’s outdoor trampoline yesterday, my kids and I piled into the car to head home.
Instantly, “Mommy I’m thirsty” filled the car and I, too, was parched. Pulling into a gas station for $3.68 unleaded (it’s come down!) I spied something even more welcome: giant refrigerator cases full of bottled sodas, Gatorade and water. My 5-year-old son said, plaintively, “I need to hydrate.”
Three chilled bottles of water later, my children and I felt much better.
I did not buy it because I thought it tasted better or was safer. I bought it because it was convenient. And therein lies a difference between Andy and me. She thinks society should stop buying a product that clearly meets a need, for which there is a substantial demand, because it uses a lot of fuel and the price is too high.
Well, according to basic economics, the price includes fuel costs, and it isn’t too high if people are still willing to buy it in large quantities. Which they are: since 2003, bottled water has been America’s second-largest commercial beverage by volume.
The environmental argument is the only one that carries weight, because that is a “public good” that the market can’t price into the equation. But this argument applies to all plastic consumer packaging, which means pretty much everything these days.
Instead of trying to ban bottled water or putting ketchup or laundry detergent in something else (metal? ceramic?), we should support efforts at more easily-recyclable plastic such as lightweight PET plastic.
Dennis Sabourin, executive director of the National Association for PET Container Resources, Nestle reduced its water bottle weight by 35 percent with PET bottles, which means lighter loads and less fuel. Nestle recently committed to even more aggressive measures by 2013.
Yes, carrying tap water in reusable containers is cheaper and saves energy. And we often do so. But water remains iced only so long in 90-degree weather. And would Andy really suggest that my children have had the option of only sugary sodas instead? Which, of course, were also in … plastic. In fact, given the huge rate of obesity, isn’t the rise in bottled water demand a good thing?
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Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
Remember your incredulity when some shoppers first started buying bottled water? “We’re buying water now?” we’d say to ourselves, laughing at the amount of H20 some people were heaving into their trunks. In no time at all, most of us got into the habit as well. Now, however, the whole bottled-water phenomenon has become hard to swallow.
Most people buy bottled water either because they think it tastes better and or because it’s safer. Yet in blind taste tests, consumers can’t tell the difference between bottled water and tap, (and a few minutes in the fridge improves the taste even more). Various studies also show that bottled water is on average no healthier for you than tap. What’s more, 40 percent of bottled water comes from the same source as tap water. It is simply packaged prettily and sold back to you at up to 4,000 times the cost.
Just making all those bottles we drink takes more than 17 million barrels of oil in a year. That’s enough to fuel more than a million cars annually, and all for a product we can get in our kitchen or workplaces. The current economy requires some painful belt-tightening, but I found it relatively easy to let go of this expensive, wasteful habit. A cheap filter and a chemically safe, reusable plastic or aluminum bottle is enough to keep me hydrated, saving my summer survival funds for beach and lake water instead.
Gigi Kellett, director of Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign, recently spoke to me about encouraging consumers to go back to the tap. She acknowledges that some communities have inferior water supplies but urges them to fight for improved systems, rather than relying on a short-term fix of bottled water. Thinking outside the bottle, Kellett declares, is simply “more sustainable, better for the environment, better for our pocketbooks and better for our public water systems.”
Here’s my favorite reason for turning on the faucet: I no longer wonder if some modern day version of a snake oil salesman has his hand in my pocket. Now as I head to the gym to work out, refreshing bottle of tap water in hand, I feel like I’m exercising common sense as well.