The solution is to legislate bottled water companies out of existence, and keep our public water systems in good shape.
But that's not what anyone working for a company founded on laying dubious legal claims to water that should be public, and selling it for a profit, wants to hear.
The water in my country is fantastic. That being said we have to buy all bottled (in plastic) water for my Mother for the past ten years or so. Why? She had many cancers over the years and it was dcotor's advice to avoid tapwater due to the possibility of pipes introducing germs etc which her immune system could not handle.
The tap water at closest source were scientifically tested to be decent , but the pipes that carries it, and the pipes that is inside my building were not. Mostly with added lead and heavy metal.
I wish I didn't knew any of these. I wish I could have simply continue to drink water like I once did. But now I get to spend money buying drinking water or filters.
I feel like this is the clearest truly viable future. Where you take all your containers and bags to the supermarket and refill them from bins and taps. If you can carry all that stuff home, you can carry it there.
Taxing bad behavior often comes off as regressive, as are laws that would "require reuse". But the measures do work. If there are ways to encourage the good behavior without imposing financially-punitive burdens (which adversely affect the ones who value each cent more), they should be pursued instead.
The city I grew up in offered all residents a free recycling bin when those were just coming into vogue. I don't see why there can't be financial assistance for supplying these free or at a discount.
I don't believe this has to be a regressive burden if approached correctly.
Sure. But that's different than "require reuse" (implying penalties if not) and "tax paid on X". Your city was wise to encourage recycling, but others telling people to just eat cake after they impose penalties/taxes are not the ones really negatively affected by the taxes anyways.
Bottle deposits can have negative effects, though; anecdotally, where I used to live, some people would rip up existing trash bags or recycling dumpsters and pore through the contents to get bottles to recycle. Which technically increases recycling but can result in the ruin of public and private property.
They do that all over the place, on trash day people scour neighborhoods looking for "the good stuff" before the city trash truck gets to the recycling bins. "Big trash day" is the best as people go around tearing up sofa-beds and whatnot going after any scraps of metal.
Not that I really mind, I just put my recyclables next to the apartment dumpster and they get picked up real quick.
I don't really mind either, as long as it isn't making life difficult for other people. Most of the people pulling cans and bottles out of the trash near me push the bins back into their holding case and close the door when they're done.
This happens in front of police officers and I think it's not terrible for anyone. I've only ever seen trouble when some officers intervened when someone dumped the bin out on the side walk to sort through then absent mindedly walked away.
It'd be really nice for us as a society to put together some more productive employment opportunities for people down on their luck, and I am always happy to see (and tip well as a result) a cafe near me that has someone in rough luck put out the chairs every morning and carry heavy things. It's expensive as an employer to do that, their reliability tends to be lower than someone with a stable housing situation, but it is worth the cost in the long run - so long as we don't foist the entire cost burden onto small business owners.
The pollution caused by plastic bottles, and the cost to clean them up, are not paid for by the people buying them.
10c tariff for every individual plastic item should solve the problem. Use the money to fund public water fountains, and 5c to whomever hands in the bottles to be recycled.
A more general solution would be to require that at least e.g. 30% of plastic in new products is recycled. Regardless of the details it should create economic incentive to sustain plastic recycling companies in 1st world countries.
I think recycling is the distraction that packaging companies use to stop the public being infinitely angry with them for spewing infinite garbage into the world.
Hey, it's OK that we're making never ending garbage, look, its being recycled!
But the reality is that most recycling was just garbage being sent to China and now China has stopped accepting it the lie of recycling has been exposed. Gigantic piles of "recycling" are accumulating around the world.
"Recycling" isn't any solution to the garbage manufacturing industry / packaging industry.
If we want a world that isn't "garbage world" then we have to stop paying companies to make garbage/packaging.
Fun story I heard back in my first year of university. This was over a decade ago, so I can't recall sources.
A paper company was required to use x% recycled paper. This cost more money. To make up the loss, the company had to make more paper. A recycling initiative to save trees led to the cutting down of even more trees.
Interesting. I wonder how much paper and plastic industries have in common.
In the case of plastic, the goal is to capture waste before it gets into the environment. For paper that isn't a concern since it is cellulose. However, ramping up plastic production certainly is a threat, especially as the industry might react with hostility to green tech.
Absolutely. Then we can hope people would push for 100% recycling when they make this exact realization for themselves.
Starting with 100% recycling feels like a non-starter, but getting a foothold with something like 30%, or enough to sustain that industry I mentioned, could be a beginning.
Plastics can cause diseases by contaminating the food and drinks they contain. Let us keep this aside for a moment.
Recycling\reusing requires a lot of infrastructure and political will. This may work well in Western nations. What about the third world? I can assure you it will not. Third world polluting the waterways will have consequences for Western nations too. Pollution may begin as a local problem, but it always becomes global sooner than later.
300 million years ago Earth had a problem with cellulose. Plants produced a lot, no one consumed it, it accumulated for millennia and later became what we call fossil fuel.
Then modern fungi evolved, and the problem went away. Just like plastic, cellulose can provide energy when oxidized, it’s just tricky to break but that’s what modern fungi do.
I wonder can we genetically engineer a bacteria or fungi that will consume that plastic? Ideally, before we have drunk the water from these plastic bottles.
Biodegradability and sterility seem like something that frustratingly are in opposition - how do you keep the pathogens out while allowing microbes to consume them?
I could see ideally a chemical self destruct timer like "it becomes biodegradable in 30 years" but that is clearly easier said than done given issues like reaction rates varying by temperature.
What pathogens? If you have microbes that can use the plastic as a carbon source, they have a competitive advantage and will out-compete anything else.
Look up how ethanol fermentation is done -- it's actually not that sterile. The yeast secrete alcohol that effectively kills off competitors. A similar effect has been taken advantage of by engineering some yeasts to consume an unnatural source of phosphorus (phosphite).
So if you were to evolve a microbe that can eat certain types of plastic, it would readily outcompete everything else.
Pathogens is used as an abbreviation for harmful bacteria/virus/fungus that are meant to be kept out by the plastic. Good point that the process may be less than friendly to other pathogens that could be let in - after its gone may be an issue but hopefully it would be "tamper-evident".
Although even if the bacteria itself is innocuous the byproducts may be less than healthy - alcohol isn't exactly great for humans although it is widely enjoyed and well botulism is far worse and I expect half-digested plastics to be less than healthy even if they are chemically inert.
What kind of crucial infrastructure and components are made of the same plastics consumed by said bacteria/fungi? If it was released to just consume plastic what kind of damage could it do? Can we engineer such a thing just for ocean plastics?
Doesn't this already happen with wood? How fast do wood homes deteriorate? I think there are some fundamental limits to how fast biological processes can process materials which will work in our favor. We'll have to make some adjustments to how we build things (making some things more accessible so they can be easily maintained/replaced) but relative to climate change that doesn't seem like that bad of a problem.
I'd be concerned about household plastic products degrading over time. Would an original Atari still be in any fit shape today if such bacteria or fungi had been around?
This is a semi-valid concern. It would take a relatively small amount of an organism to contaminate something, and unless you're regularly cleaning everything made of those types of plastics you could have some real issues.
We fight mold and termites now in our living spaces, imagine if you had a plastic-eating organism and a little bit took up residence in a hotel, an office, your car, a bus or train, your house.
Even if it was relatively slow at breaking down it could cause considerable cosmetic damage. A little gets on your laptop display. You leave it at home and go on vacation for a week, you come back and some light etching has occurred over streaks of your monitor and the screen is now fogged and needs replaced, you wipe the exterior down as best as you can before replacing the screen and are pretty sure you got it all. Your screen gets replaced, your laptop works great again until a month later you pick it up and your spacebar falls off, the plastic switch entirely degraded, you open up the laptop only to find most of the internal plastic is structurally compromised, you unknowingly transferred some of the organism inside when you replaced your screen.
Here in Indiana, sometimes in the spring and summer, there's this fungus called 'lawn rust' that has orange spores that resemble rust and get on your lawn and will even get on vehicles (which will just wash off) but imagine something getting in the wild and landing on your car with a largely plastic body... go a week or a month without washing your car and you might get home from the car wash one day and notice your bumpers are pitted, oh darn the future plastic eating bacteria/fungi strikes again.
Even if only kept this stuff in industrial facilities, unless you go NASA level clean-room when leaving the facility it'd be damn easy for some to hitch a ride on someone headed home from work and, well, "life will find a way".
I don't think it would be that big a deal. For the longest time things were built with leather and wood instead of rubber/plastic and society survived just fine.
I think a lot of people are over-reacting to the idea of plastic rotting because they live in the Southern California filter bubble where nothing rots or rusts (because it's basically a desert) and so the idea that one wouldn't just be able to leave materials outside and expect them to be just fine is foreign to them. Having materials naturally degrade over time is just a fact of life everywhere else on the planet.
Is plastic used for those sorts of structures? I've had lots of plastic stuff degrade with exposure to sun and salt. What seems to last is stone and concrete to me
Well plastic does not really contribute to climate change at the moment. Bacteria breaking down the plastic would release CO2 and thus contribute to climate change.
These discussions on the internet so rarely bring any true insight to most topics, but the few nuggets that are rarely found sure make looking for it pretty addictive.
That's not what I meant although my wording doesn't help. An environment completely polluted by plastic that we just keep pumping more into it? Bad. A world where we live a bit more harmoniously with nature, making products that are compatible with long-term maintenance of our environment?
Good. That type of thinking tends to go hand-in-hand with addressing climate change.
Doesn't seem like helpful categorization to me, especially if the decomposition of plastic ended up making its own CO2. Though apparently burning plastic and capturing the energy may result in less CO2 release than putting it in a landfill: https://phys.org/news/2009-08-plastic.html
There was a short story I recall reading a while ago where there was a release of such a bacteria and it told the story about how that release screwed up the world slowly as it spread. Can't for the life of me find it however.
Well imagine you Atari case were made of wood, if it weren't exposed to excessive moisture, or kept in contact with soil it would still be in fine shape.
Now imagine how much time and energy it would take to gather 15x6x2in blocks of wood. To mill them out to shape, transport them. How long does it take to grow trees big enough to get such large blocks from?
Quite a bit worse than a bit of injection molded plastic.
I just wonder how our ancestors did it. Not only did they survive without plastic bottles, but they even survived the last 99.99% of biological history without plumbing!
I drives me mad. We solved the problem over a century ago. The ancient Greeks and Romans even solved it in their time.
The problem was reinvented by marketing, and everyone fell for it, to the point that kids are told to take plastic water bottles to school (despite the existence of water taps there), and public announcements at train and tube stations warn people not to travel without a plastic bottle, in case they have to survive without a sip of water for an hour. It's like we're all living in the Sahara desert. It's insane.
From a marketing PoV it must be the single most successful campaign in history. And given its success, and massive profits, they should be the ones whom foot the bill for cleaning up the godawful mess they've created.
> I just wonder how our ancestors did it. Not only did they survive without plastic bottles, but they even survived the last 99.99% of biological history without plumbing!
the species survived without those things. plenty of individuals didn't.
We can go back to how our ancestors did it, using leather and clay for drink containers. We can spend twice as much transport pollution in order to ship our drinks in clay amphoras that weigh almost as much as their contents, as Romans did; and we can carry around flasks from slaughtered animals instead of recycled plastic. It's possible, but it doesn't mean that it's better.
We shouldn't be shipping bottles unless we absolutely have too. Ship the liquid in large efficient containers. Wanna go back to the Romans? They weren't shipping little 20oz amphoras enmasse, no they were carrying 41 quarts... apparently that's a standard too. Good job Rome.
I agree with you however as "moonka" says below there are some legit problems with tap water in certain areas. Not to mention that they have basically removed public water fountains from most locations.
Sure, I know there are entire continents where the water is unsafe to drink; my point is about the developed world where we largely solved the problem and then unsolved it again. Your point about removing drinking fountains is a case in point.
I'm all for capitalism. But punitive taxation can be used very effectively to reign in unbridled capitalism.
Taxing plastic production, and properly rewarding recycling or reuse schemes would be have a pretty big impact to the bottom lines of some companies and I think we'd be amazed by how quick they solved the problem.
Ya but the problem isnt in the bottles. The problem is that there is a perfectly good existing way to deliver water to peoples homes already. Its just not very profitable. The bottle water companies created a market where none was needed. You could punish them via taxing bottles but I dont know that that is where the problem really is...
> I just wonder how our ancestors did it. Not only did they survive without plastic bottles, but they even survived the last 99.99% of biological history without plumbing!
At very low density, applying a very significant fraction of their energy to basic survival needs that we take for granted.
That sounds impossibly expensive; I'm sure there's some of the super-rich that do it, but it sounds more like a glossy story than something ubiquitous.
I would believe it if they "just" got tankers of clean water from elsewhere though. Plenty of people that have to survive off of water from tankers.
Basically it's more practical to keep the booze in the back of the casino and plumb it into a network of bars, instead of keeping track of which bar is running out.
Particularly when a single casino may have a hundred bars.
From a brewery in the historical center of Bruges to the outskirts IIRC. Which allows a working business better transport links so it can stay in the center to help avoid the city becoming completely Disneyland.
The only evidence I can provide is I once knew the groundskeeper for a group of properties owned by the super rich. One of his responsibilities was accepting the deliveries.
These properties were in a built up residential area.
The most interesting thing to me about the Flint water crisis is that it's mostly PR. Which isn't to say the water isn't crap. Just that it's by far not the only contaminated water in the US. It gets all the press, though.
In the town I went to primary and secondary school, the tap water fizzed and tasted terrible.
I think nice, reusable containers are key. Everyone in my household has two water bottles. Maybe one gets replaced a year, usually because it got lost. Even then, you need a decent filter or other way to get non-gross water. Fortunately, we are now on a well and the water is fantastic.
What does the full analysis of what goes into bottled water look like? Because it seems to me like, at this point, the "bottle" part of bottled water could be the least worrisome bit. Even if you get rid of the bottle, what does it take just to physically ship all this water around?
It's pretty heavy stuff. I'd assume its probably much more economical to transport in pipes than in trucks. Sort of like we do with things like oil and gas, when it's feasible to do so.
You could even extend these pipelines into customers' homes, completely eliminating the need for truck / car transport and packaging up to the last mile.
Do people actually buy bottled water for use at home? My understanding was you either have a water filter tap or you buy those big boxes of water. Bottled water only makes sense to me if you are outside and didn't take a bottle with you.
When I lived in Germany almost all my German friends bought large bottles of water to drink at home and never/rarely drank tap water. It's also uncommon for people to order tap water in restaurants. It would be interesting to know how this became common practice. They do often use reusable bottles, though.
In the United States, most bottled water isn't shipped very far. For example, the Nestle water sitting in front of me says the source is Denver's municipal water system.
The Safeway bottled water I buy when I'm in California says it comes from Sacramento's municipal water system.
Unless you buy something exotic like Fiji or NYC2O water, chances are it comes from a nearby city.
Your post describes things in kind of an odd hypothetical fashion considering we already ship water around in pipes and aqueducts. That's been done for a couple thousand years. It's way more efficient than any other method.
The "bottle" part is pretty bad. I heard somewhere a water bottle will last 400 years. I don't know for certain that that's true, but if it is, I can only wonder just who thought it would make an ideal container for someone to use for a few minutes and then throw away?
Taking 400 years to biodegrade is a big problem if you're worried about litter, or microplastics. On other hand, if you're more worried about things like climate change or smog, then turning it into something you bury and forget about might actually be the least harmful thing we could be doing with all this oil we've been pumping out of the ground lately.
If it biodegrades, then it becomes a source of atmospheric CO2 just about as efficiently as if you were instead to burn it to make cars go.
Yes, I agree, and I'd go so far as to saying burning it is in one way better than it ending up in the sea, but clearly very bad in another sense. Just another example of how different facets of the "environmental" argument can be in conflict with one another.
Nuclear power vs coal/oil power is similar dilemma.
If the average failure rate is 400 years and the failure rate is close to Gaussian, how many coke bottles can you store in your warehouse for a month and expect not to have one leak? Not having a bottle leak is the whole point of a bottle. It might not matter to you if every once in a while a bottle you are handling leaks, but if you are shipping millions of them around in harsh conditions it would be nice not to have your truck covered in sticky corn syrup when you get to the store to off load.
True, but I imagine that at the start they kept changing the bottles so they were made with as little plastic as practical while still not bursting very often while shipping and in storage. One burst per million over 3 months? Wonder what kind of mean time to burst that would give the group?
Question: Are cans much better for the environment? I've long preferred cans to bottles for things like soda (although I almost never drink it anymore), sparkling water, etc. They've always seemed to get and stay colder, although that may not be the case. I feel a little bit better about my preference when picking a canned La Croix over a bottled Arrowhead at work, but I realize now that I don't really have any idea about the environmental impact of cans v. bottles.
Aluminum cans are very easy to recycle. About 2/3 worldwide are recycled, which is the highest of any material.
They probably just seem like they get colder because of the higher conductivity of the aluminum. The downside is that they don't stay cold nearly as long as a plastic bottle. The condensation that forms on the outside of a cold can expends a lot of energy into the liquid.
Cans are more straightforward to recycle, and have a small positive residual value without subsidies. Bottles do not.
It’s also surprisingly easy and cheap to make your own sparkling water. If you get a counter top unit, people make CO2 adapters for them that let you use standard 5/20 lb cylinders rather than the way overpriced ones the original vendor has. A standard 20lbs cylinder will last 22x as long as the cylinder the units come with, and don’t cost much more to exchange. A welding supply shop typically has food grade CO2 for roughly $1-3/lb as they also supply all the nearby restaurants.
If you want flavors without sugar, bitters used for cocktails make for a easy way to flavor the water you just carbonated.
Aluminum isn't ferromagnetic so magnets don't work with it and stripping the graphics off a soda can alone requires just as much energy and nasty chemicals as other recycled materials. That's before you even smelt anything, which usually requires a forge that spends insane amounts of energy just to keep it from shutting down and needing an even more expensive cold start.
It's not that recycling aluminum is easier than other materials, it's that making aluminum from raw bauxite is like the above process times ten. The chemicals are even more dangerous, the process management (environmental protection, regulatory compliance, etc) more expensive, and it requires even more energy. As a result, between 1/3 to 2/3 of all aluminum sold in the US comes from recycled materials because of economic reasons.
Your mention of advertising... I'd be really happy if we could start cutting down the insane effort we're putting into dyeing things and just relegate flashy marketing to the waste bin of history. The same with form advertising (clam shells and the like) where additional material is added just to make a product look more attractive.
The clam shells make shoplifting difficult, and you need to get the barcode onto the can at a minimum, at which point what difference does the rest of the label make?
I was likely wrong wrt my argumentation. However, Eddy currents (TIL) make seperation _fairly_ easy if you have the right equipment, and comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702317 seems to think "cleaning" and smelting are easier than in the plastic bottle case.
I assume the main difference is the high temperatures used to melt metals like aluminum back down to ingots will either burn off all the contaminants or bring their remains to the surface to be easily removed like skimming dross.
Plastics recycling is a much more delicate process, requiring all sorts of washing steps and finely controlled relatively low temperatures.
For water, get it from your tap, and carry it with you in a glass or metal container. If you have good, scientifically reasons to believe your tap water is not so hot, use a high-tech filter. In the extreme, buy water in mass from a company that purifies it, and store it at home. All these solutions will be better for the environment, and as an added benefit much cheaper.
As for soft drinks, they are bad for your health, so just stop drinking them.
If I had water that was proven to be unsafe, I wouldn't trust many "consumer grade" filters, and I'd want to do regular water testing to prove that any treatment that I do hasn't silently failed to work.
Those 10 rivers are all in the developing world and China: the Hai, Nile, Meghna, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Pearl, Amur, Niger, Mekong, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze. In terms of countries that's: China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria.
And as the 60 Minutes documentary talks about, the US ships a huge amount of recycled plastics across the ocean to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and until recently, China.
So the plastic you throw in the recycling bin in the US might very well end up in one of those 10 polluted rivers and in the ocean.
>Trash from just 10 rivers is responsible for 90 percent of ocean plastic pollution
Is this still being misquoted? If you read the article you will see that it say 90% of plastic pollution from rivers are from those 10 rivers, not 90% of plastic pollution. A large part of the plastic pollution is not coming through rivers. It is also not much of a surprise that the rivers with most pollution is large rivers going through areas where many peoples live. Have anyone calculated how much is is per person living next to the rivers?
I'm not saying that it isn't important to clean up those rivers, but that it still is important what each of us do
Seems like a crazy good opportunity for a few NGOs to show incredibly high environmental benefits for a few bucks.... put up barriers, nets, or filters in the 10 sources, capture and dispose before it reaches the ocean.
One important thing that often gets overlooked though, before people start feeling super guilty about using plastic bottles and those can holders: most plastic in the ocean flows down the rivers in Asia, not so much Europe / the US. Probably because we have a good trash management infrastructure. Landfills and incinerators are pretty bad, but I think especially landfills are preferable about just tossing it wherever and having it flow into rivers / the sea.
TL;DR: Pay your taxes so the government can employ people to manage trash. Also, don't litter.
Until recently most of the plastic recycling from the US was shipped to China. So it's possible that the plastic flowing down the rivers in Asia was actually American plastic.
I think that is the reality people are coming to about most plastics. While metal, glass, and paper are quite recyclable, plastic is not nearly as recyclable as the general public is led to believe.
The pragmatic reality is that most plastics, for the time being, are likely better off going into landfills as opposed to entering a long inefficient global supply chain which leaks a non trivial amount of that plastic into the surrounding environment. While at the same time providing minimal utility as base material for new products.
Tap water tastes gross in every major N. American city I've lived in. I'll filter it, air it out and chill it. But out of the tap, N. American water tastes bad. A little town in Albania I've visited once has (much) tastier water than any city I've been here.
I can't blame ppl for drinking bottled water (Evian is gross though)
Installing an under-sink replaceable inline filter is a surprisingly easy DIY task if you want better tasting water. Parts are not expensive. Skip the thin white ones used for refrigerator/ice makers, and go the next size up.
Spend a little extra on a shut-off valve with a handle and install that first, just upstream of the new filter, to make changing filters easier (every 3-6 months, depends on water quality & volume). You will still have excellent water pressure at the sink, even if you use the newer thin and flexible 'push fit' tubes and couplings. I don't really have any plumbing experience and did not have any difficulty. Visit a professional plumbing supply business, explain what you are doing, and ask them to give you every single part you need. You may be pleasantly surprised at how simple it is. I think I spent the equivalent of about $80 for everything, including an upgraded valve and clear filter housing (to make visually inspecting the filter possible).
Don't forget the little bleed valve at the top of the filter container! After you turn the house water back on, it should hiss as the air escapes. When water dribbles out just hand tighten and you are done, no leaks.
This is one of the best investments I've made. It's simple and cheap. However, I've heard that it's quite wasteful in terms of water. When you're living in a place where water isn't abundant (SoCal), you have to also be conscious of this too. Everything has a trade-off and there are people with differing opinions on nearly everything.
"But out of the tap, N. American water tastes bad."
This may be true in the cities/neighborhoods that you've lived in, but in most (not all) of the cities I've lived in, the tap water has been excellent.
To say that all North American tap water tastes bad is simply false.
It's also got trace amounts of fluoride, which is good for your teeth. Ask any Canadian or English dentist about the difference between countries like the US that flouridate the tap water and countries that don't.
And yet, repeatedly in this thread I asked for scientific studies on the effects of tap water, and nobody provided them. Hmmm. Perhaps "steady on" should be your watchword.
Tap water tastes different in every city. While I can't fault Indianapolis for drinking bottled water, Wisconsin Dells should never buy a single bottle.
The supply of the city I live in currently has a bit of a metallic tang to it, but it's fine out of the tap.
Might even taste different in different parts of the city. I hate the water at my place. I'm thirsty right now, and I kinda want wanter, but I kinda don't want my tap water.
I spent the weekend at my sister's place around seven kilometers from here and the water was just fine.
You must not have visited NYC or SF, both of which have excellent water. NYC's comes from upstate aquifers while SF gets from Hetch Hetchy in the Sierra.
Unless the water is very high in minerals, I haven't really noticed much distinguishable difference in taste between tap waters at various major cities/metropolitan areas. I'm definitely not a water aficionado to tell though.
I can see how people may psychologically (or psychosomatically) establish a taste difference between water from the sink and water from a plastic bottle based on perceived cleanliness and hygiene. There are times where I would rather drink filtered water from the fridge over the sink (even though both come from the same water line in the house), like if there's dirty dishes in the sink.
Overall, I think drinking from the fridge tastes the same if not better than bottled water (plus it's always chilled from the fridge), and costs less than bottled water overall (I let my filter go like 6mo past the replacement notification before replacing it). The only thing that sucks is replacing fridge filters, which are the ink cartridges of refrigerator companies.
Drinking bottled water at home when there are cups, reusable bottles, and chilled filtered water sources seems unnecessary and excessive.
Possibly thanks to beer, St. Louis's water is also some of the best in the nation. A common myth (or is it?) is that Anheuser-Busch pressures the city maintain a high quality water system, so they can brew high quality beer. [0]
The funny part is if you go 4 miles west, coldwater creek comes into play, which is famously radioactive. [1]
I would assume that is a myth. A major brewery like any of the ones operated by AB-Inbev strips the water of any mineral impurities by reverse osmosis before adding back in the mineral profile they're looking for for that particular brew. (source: tour of AB brewery in Fairfield)
Vancouver has some of the tastiest water out there. It's also quite soft compared to other natural sources. Same with Seattle, Portland, and those areas in the NW.
Five whys seems to indicate that the main problem is bottled water companies compete on clarity, bottled water companies could/would use recycled plastic if they had to use an opaque plastic container, like what soylent uses, rather than competing on "clear". Banning sales of bottled water in clear containers would allow all bottled water companies to still compete on packaging, while removing the limitation that they all use new, super clear plastic.
Yeah, I’ve seen restaurants serve water in cardboard boxes (think a bigger juice box). There are options, but yeah; we like to be able to see through our water.
So In my country, If you want to buy a bottle of cocacola fanta etc. You can only buy it if you come with an empty bottle of the same product. This is a way of life. The same thing can be done with bottle water. To buy bottle water, return an empty bottle of water. If you don't then you pay premium
I managed to completely stop buying regular water bottles in favor of using a refillable vacuum-insulated bottle at all times (except for a handful that I keep in the car for emergencies), but I've noticed the plastic bottles are starting to creep back in ever since I stopped drinking sodas and moved to sparkling water. I guess I could switch to canned Perrier or even the glass bottles, but they're harder to find.
I suppose next year I'll just bite the bullet and buy a Soda Stream (or some kind of BDS-approved equivalent).
The price is basically the same as sourcing the parts (regulator, tubing, tank, etc) yourself, it comes pre-assembled, that size CO2 tank will last a while (around a year for us with multiple people in the hot south), costs $15 to refill, and you can dial up/down the pressure to change the bubbliness of your soda.
It's also useful for seating tubeless tires if you ride mountain bikes. :)
I don't really understand why most if not all bottles don't use aluminum instead of plastic. I get that it's a marketing thing, but I see no practical reason why aluminum couldn't be used more often. That doesn't fix the littering of the ocean issue, but I guess if I had to pick one over the other I'd rather the ocean get trashed with aluminum than with plastic.
Also, do you need Perrier brand specifically? I haven't seen that come in cans, but now there are more brands than ever of sparkling water that come in cans, which is what I most often buy.
> I don't really understand why most if not all bottles don't use aluminum instead of plastic.
Because aluminium is a lot more expensive and difficult to manufacture at scale than plastic. It's also a lot more reusable, but reusing aluminium costs energy, and reusing glass bottles requires either energy to melt it, or an extensive recycling / reusing infrastructure (like with beer bottles over here).
Re: sparkling water, there's water fountains that can produce sparkling water on the fly now. Ask your employer to get those installed.
Something I know a boat load about. You are correct glass I would say is the worse for recycling (unless like you stated there's an infrastructure in place). At municipal recycling facilities (MRF) glass is the first to come off the recycling line. It gets smashed up and anything that is roughly 3inches or smaller ends up in the glass, so a lot of contamination.
Aluminum is easier to recycle, but you cannot melt down cans (UBC's) back into cans without blending metals as they consist of two different aluminum (the top and the body). If the cans are completely clean the big guys (alcan...) can melt them down. If there is any contamination it has to go to a secondary smelter which adds to the process.
Isn't aluminium supposed to be toxic? Probably the amount absorbed from drinking from aluminium bottles wouldn't be enough to cause concern, but I'm not sure I would risk drinking from them all the time.
Aluminum is one of the most abundant minerals on earth. It's probably in just about everything. You almost certainly get more from your anti-perspirant that you do from an aluminum can.
Water is not packaged in aluminum cans because of consumer views. Plastic is clear, so you can see the "clear, pure water" inside. Metal cans are more often associated with beer and soda, and there's the distant association of metals with a metallic taste (something that doesn't happen as all aluminum cans are epoxy-lined to prevent corrosion). Some sparkling water is still packaged in aluminum cans, but the vast majority choose not to.
Paper is probably the most ecologically friendly water packaging, followed by glass.
We use a Soda Stream and now quite easily just use tap water and carbonate it. I highly recommend it. The downside is that not many local places do the canister exchange where I live so we try to stock up.
I never bought bottled water before in the first place, but I do find it practical to keep a pack of them in the car in case I need them. They'd also be useful in emergencies. If I kept home-filled bottles around in there that long they would get gunky.
>If I kept home-filled bottles around in there that long they would get gunky.
If the bottles are clean, and the water is clean, the water will not get "gunky". I have a few 20L water containers at home for emergencies. I sanitized the containers and filled them with chlorinated tap water. A few years after I filled them, while I was moving, the water was still fresh tasting and clear.
As far as I know, yeah. This one's probably marked up because it looks fancier, I have a cheaper version (Soda Stream Source) but happened to see this one on SlickDeals recently.
The main value they add is a convenient CO2 tank exchange program at places like Staples and Best Buy. I'm sure rigging your own system with a bigger tank would be cheaper in the long run, but I don't have space for it.
I'm the founder of Tap previously the CEO and Founder of MakeSpace. Earlier this year I began working on a new company with the goal of eliminating the single use plastic water bottle.
Earlier this year I made an observation, the first step of any scientific experiment, that launched Tap. I noticed water fountains were not on Google Maps. This puzzled me and led me to dive deeper into understanding the beverage market.
TL;DR -- The answer is going to be carrying your own bottle (Like we all did in high school / college / burning man). But the lack of knowing where to find clean, unpackaged water is the reason for the growth of single-use plastic bottles. We've set out to change that.
Here's my thoughts:
The beverage industry is ripe for disruption. There are two glaring problems plaguing the industry:
The first is that the amount of waste created is terrible for our environment. With ~9% of plastic waste actually getting recycled, we're seeing massive amounts of plastic go straight to landfills and our oceans. Now that China has recently rejected our plastic and cardboard, that problem is going to get worse...fast. As local, city, state, and even international governments ban single use plastic (ex. European Union), the opportunity has finally emerged. In these progressive cities, I think the beverage industry will respond to the local ban by moving to paper, aluminum, or glass. But any of these moves would actually INCREASE the cost of goods sold from materials and transportation as plastic has always been the cheapest option. Coca-Cola has even referenced this in its 2017 10-K. (direct quote below)
“Changes in, or failure to comply with, the laws and regulations applicable to our products or our business operations could increase our costs or reduce our net operating revenues. Changes in applicable laws or regulations or evolving interpretations thereof... to discourage the use of plastic, including regulations relating to recovery and/or disposal of plastic packaging materials due to environmental concerns... may result in increased compliance costs, capital expenditures and other financial obligations for us and our bottling partners, which could affect our profitability, or may impede the production, distribution, marketing and sale of our products, which could affect our net operating revenues.”
The second is the decline of consumer preference to sugary drinks. The bottling industry, at one time, was significantly more decentralized because people cared about the taste of local water. Inventions like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) created most of the beverages we grew up drinking and this taste became more manufactured. However, the health problems associated with HFCS have been enough to slow revenue from these products. In 2017, for the first time bottled water sales exceed those of sugary drinks.
Now we see Coke/Pepsi/Nestle pushing hard into bottled water sales. We’re also seeing JUSTWater (Jaden Smith) and Boxed Water come about, in addition to Watermelon water which addresses the eco and consumer preference change.
These, in my opinion, are just a half step forward. So what's the answer? Well, think outside the bottle.
Tap is going to disrupt the beverage industry by decentralizing the bottling industry. We've created a consumer alternative to packaged beverages -- a marketplace for unpackaged beverages with a group of users, with 17,000 users in <60 days since launch, who carry their own bottles. As 65% of the cost of a beverage today goes into transportation and packaging, by the mere change that the user carries their own bottle, we can massively win on beverage options and lower prices. Water is our first product.
Furthermore, sales of reusable bottles (Contigo -- 45 million units per year, SOMA ,Swell, Klean, Yeti, Hydroflask) are skyrocketing with over 51% of new reusable bottle sales being attributed to the consumers wanting to reduce their plastic usage.
An article was published this past week in the WSJ taking aim at water bottles. Specifically, the WSJ spoke to bottled water’s massive growth over the years, and how its future is suddenly uncertain because of the movement to halt the plastic crisis.
Highlights on the market:
“Bottled-water sales have boomed in recent decades amid safety fears about tap water and a shift away from sugary drinks. Between 1994 and 2017, U.S. consumption soared 284% to nearly 42 gallons a year per person, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a consulting firm.”
That is unparalleled growth… And of this boom in the U.S., 67% of all packaged water sold has come in single-serve, disposable bottles.
While the news has decreased public trust in tap water, and consumers continue to shift away from sugary drinks, something interesting is happening...Due to a massive uptick in public awareness about the plastic issue, single-use bottled-water sales are actually BEGINNING TO SLOW.
“Bottled-water volume growth is forecast to slow this year in both the U.S. and globally, according to research firm Euromonitor. Nestlé SA, the world’s biggest bottled-water maker, in October said its bottled-water volumes for the first nine months of the year declined 0.2%, compared with 2.1% growth a year earlier.”
Something interesting is happening here. Consumers are still BUYING water at record pace because they can’t trust the tap, however, they aren’t purchasing single-use plastic. Drinking water sales aren’t DECLINING, they are SHIFTING… They are shifting towards bulk packaging. Consumers are shifting to bulk because bulk is the only easily available alternative.
Another staggering statistic was released showing that one in five consumers in the last twelve months have purchased a reusable water bottle. Of these consumers, 52% of them said the leading driver was to reduce their personal plastic usage. 20% of consumers in the last 12 months alone purchasing a new reusable bottle proves there is a large market of people who incorporate reusable bottles into their daily routine.
Beverage companies are working to catch up with the trend. According to the WSJ, “Pepsi also now sells reusable water bottles that come with capsules to add flavors, and is testing stations in the U.S. that dispense Aquafina-branded water in different flavors.”
There are in fact other solutions, but major beverage brands find they are not favorable. “A former Nestlé executive said the company’s internal research showed consumers were unlikely to take to boxed water. Glass bottles, meanwhile, break easily and are expensive to transport because they are heavy.”
“Poland Spring-owner Nestlé is rolling out glass and aluminum packaging for some brands and researching ways to make all its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025.”
These alternatives will all INCREASE THE COST OF GOODS SOLD, and these “solutions” are still wasteful.
So here is where we think we fit in… and it’s what we're working to prove.
“It’s tempting to romanticize a world without packaging,” Coca-Cola Co. CEO James Quincey wrote in a blog post this year.
It’s tempting because it is happening and within our reach.
Brands like Pepsi (SodaStream) and FloWater are growing rapidly due to their unique position in being able to provide UNPACKAGED and TRUSTED water. This is the only solution that caters to the needs of those who don’t want the plastic bottle, but still desired premium, filtered options. Before these brands, the choices were limited for the reusable-bottle-carrying consumer: filter your own water (ex. Brita), rely on water coolers (like in offices) or simply trust the tap. And as tap water continues to be vilified, and the other solutions aren’t convenient, there is a market of UNPACKAGED, TRUSTED water that is prime for explosive growth.
www.findtap.com / apps in Android and App store (Search "Tap Water").
Lastly, check out the #DrinkDifferent movement on Instagram at @FindTap. Join us with a 30 day pledge to skip plastic bottles.
Ps. We're hiring. Hit me up siruva07 at gmail dot com if wanna learn more.
Asked this in another thread, but putting here so you see it. What is the current scientific basis for the vilification of tap water? How unsafe or dangerous is it?
Theoretically biodegradable, but not yet shown to be. As of 2015 the longest measured time was 2 years to break down about 30% of the acetate, with a diminishing breakdown rate and a dependence on soil nitrogen availability (ocean beaches lack it).
I don’t understand the focus specifically on water bottles when this comes up, seems like any drink bottle would be just as problematic. I understand we don’t all have pipes that bring Coca-Cola to our homes, but when you’re out and need something to drink that ship has sailed.
I don’t understand the focus specifically on water bottles when this comes up.... I understand we don’t all have pipes that bring Coca-Cola to our homes
It sounds like you do understand the focus on the bottle that's easily replaced by opening a tap or using the water fountain that's found in most public places.
Likewise there's a lot of focus on replacing light bulbs with energy efficient alternatives, and less focus on replacing electric space heaters because light bulbs are easily replaced with little impact on the user (and indeed, save money over the long run) and are more common than electric space heaters.
The "everyone should change their way of life" approach to environmentalism hasn't worked and has been quite divisive, why do people continue to think it is an effective strategy?
Because the alternative is ultimately "Everyone probably won't get to stay alive". Which is a pretty big change in one's way of life.
Also, using cans instead of bottles isn't exactly a major shift in most people's life. It's infinitely recyclable (unlike plastic), something nature knows how to deal with (unlike plastic) and often better for the beverage (in the case of beer at the very least).
The alternative is the government intervening to internalize externalities. For example, a revenue neutral carbon tax or deposits on food/drink containers.
One way to encourage just that sort of city planning is, in fact, to price externalities appropriately. It's not actually cheaper to build and live in sprawl, it's fantastically expensive. But we don't charge those costs based on usage.
I can spend 400k to buy a nice four bedroom house with a garage and a basement on half an acre sixty miles from work, or 400k to buy a beat down 1 bedroom condo ten miles from work (nothing near the area where I work is under 900k)...
That's not really a city planning issue, it's just the way things are in hyper-urban areas.
I hope so much that I can pull off a remote job in the next year or so -- believe me, I'd rather never drive if I could.
If you had read the OP I was replying to, you would see they were suggesting everyone should buy and carry a Nalgene water bottle with them at all times, in case they needed water.
If you read further down this thread, many commenters in this thread are convinced that we should never package water.
Packaged water is useful when stockpiling for or responding to natural disasters (hurricanes, wildfire, tornadoes, earthquakes), emergency evacuation camps, places where safe, clean water and filters aren't easily accessible or used. Everywhere else, it's really unnecessary.
Ah, the answer I was looking for when I posted! I've long preferred cans (they seem to get and stay colder to me, although that may not be true), but wasn't sure about the environmental impact.
It's not exactly a crazy change to one's way of life. As recently as when I was a kid, people drank water out of cups. When we were out in public, we'd use a water fountain.
Carrying a water bottle with you everywhere you go is another option, but probably not strictly necessary unless you're currently trying to pass a kidney stone.
It's irrational, but people still talk about corporate responsibility in the same language they use to talk about the morality of their own and other people's behavior. Changes like these help establish the cultural consensus that environmental damage is a bad thing that should be avoided even if it means we have to invest cost and effort in change.
That's useful, however, that's not even close to the order of magnitude of lifestyle change required to counter climate change. Instead of not littering, think not using a car; instead of banning disposable bags, think banning beef; one could go on - restructuring cities to use less transportation, drastic reduction in air transport (so, no overseas travel for most people), etc. Sure, such lifestyle change is possible as well, however, instead of a fraction of people who currently volunteer to do it, we need to ensure that the vast majority of global population do so, and we need to ensure that they do it quickly enough. Which is unlikely to happen without massive coercion.
This sort of thinking is the exact problem. It works from the point of "what should we do if we think environmental concerns are the biggest priority". IMo the correct lense should be "what is the minimal amount of change/political capital we need to achieve our objectives for the environment", for different targets.
I agree that "what is the minimal amount of change/political capital we need to achieve our objectives for the environment" is a very good perspective to apply.
However, from that perspective is obvious that "littering, disposable bags" isn't even in the same ballpark. IMHO it would be counterproductive to motivate people with such goals, since if the end result is that they stop littering, switch to reusable bags and think "yeah, now I've done my part"... it's wrong, they're still contributing about 99% of the damage that they used to do, it's nowhere close to sufficient. Right now (unlike, say, the 1980s) the minimal amount of change is very, very large - currently, achieving our objectives for the environment requires changes that would be considered radical by pretty much everyone, and political capital that no current leader has.
Raise the gas price by a few percent, and you get rioting in the streets. Would anyone have enough political capital to double the gas price, so that people actually burn significantly less oil? And would the transport reduction achieved by merely doubling the gas price be sufficient to reduce the emissions? IMHO the answer to both these answers is a clear NO, the minimal amount of change needed is larger than the maximal amount of change for which we have political capital.
But all of the things you advocate for in your previous post are things that could be achieved with less pain.
Even the fuel tax, while the goal is to drive change, you can drive change by rewarding the desired behaviour (e.g. a revenue-neutral gas/carbon tax that paid back to low income folks), rather than punishing people. Maybe not as drastic a change since you don't get people not driving because they can't afford it, but it would incentivize doing something else to the same extent.
Or we could be much more aggressive about moving people to electric cars. Or we could simply invest more money/energy into making public transport better.
We could say try and convince people to fly less, or we could legislate carbon offsets for air travel.
So while, yes, serious change is needed, I think we really need to think about this from a political angle, rather than a moralising angle.
I would avoid even touching the diet angle if you want people to listen to you and not write you off. Meat does contribute noticeably to global warming, but food is culture, it is the hardest change to achieve, so we should really leave it to last, politically. It would be far better to deal with meat in an overall carbon tax solution, rather than singling it out as a thing people have to change.
We used to just use public drinking fountains. Or paper cups at the office water cooler. And kids drank out of water fountains in parks, or out of random garden hoses they found.
Yesterday I saw a kid with a fancy Nalgene... at church!
I have a pill that I take which has dry cough as a side-effect, and even I don't bring a water bottle to church. The kid's not going to shrivel up and blow away because he can't have a sip of water for 45 minutes.
I think it's really important for people to carry their own plate/bowl, cup, and utensils that they can use and wash on their own that they carry around with them wherever they go. The whole disposable plate/utensil industry could be removed if everyone just brought their own!
I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but I actually do this. I've got a spork, a glass cup, a metal straw, and a fabric napkin that I bring with me everywhere. If I'm going somewhere I know that I'll want to bring food home I'll also bring one of my metal lunch containers.
I'm carrying a backpack anyway and this is a really small amount of things to bring around. It's a very small impact from a single person, but every few times someone will say "ooh, that's a good idea" or something like that and it makes me feel like the idea is spreading.
The ADA forced the designs for water fountains to change and they have been unreliable, low-to-no flow, and too short for most people ever since. People had to learn to carry water with them when before they just drank out of a fountain when they were thirsty. At least there has been a rise in the bottle filling dispensers so that filling up your bottle is not such a pain.
Probably because it’s a relatively new problem. People drink more water than other drinks like Coke, so the impact factor is high. We also have infrastructure to deliver water without bottles (the tap), but we don’t for other drinks.
Right, I see water as particularly egregious as it's a natural product (literally pumped straight from the ground) and should be accessible in clean form anywhere in the developed world (aka most places where water bottles are commonly bought and thrown away). The solution to dirty water shouldn't be putting clean water in plastic bottles and shipping it around the world, it should be making sure water is clean enough that anywhere you go you can drink the local water without needing to buy a one-time-use plastic bottle.
It doesn't help that our solution to dirty water (plastic bottles) is making even clean water unusable (microplastic).
The infrastructure to deliver other drinks without bottles is easy and has existed since the 19th century. Just ship the flavoring agents in some sort of syrup form, and mix it with water at the dispensation site. Force-carbonate it onsite, if you like.
Compared to bottles, it has the added advantage of being really inexpensive. So much so that, when places like gas stations and convenience stores sell the same beverage in both fountain and bottled forms, the fountain version is typically sold at a steep discount relative to the bottled one.
on the other hand, this method has the substantial disadvantage that beverages delivered this way usually taste significantly worse than their bottled counterparts.
I suspect "natural" products like fruit juice necessarily suffer from being made into concentrates and reconstituted on demand. I'm not sure why it should be this way with soda, but in my experience soda from a bottle always tastes way better than from a fountain.
>beverages delivered this way usually taste significantly worse
As someone who prefers fountain soda and avoids bottle sodas due to taste (i believe it is level of carbonation), this is highly subjective and I urge you to look beyond your personal tastes (heh) on this subject.
The article talks exactly about this, and it still doesn’t address the fact that waste is still generated when we have better infrastructure for moving clean water.
Because water is fungible, can be produced locally, is piped into homes, and is the most abundant liquid on the planet. Shipping it around in tiny little bottles is phenomenally inefficient. A total waste. There is no reason why we cannot fill reusable water bottles on the go rather than purchase flimsy containers.
Besides clean sources of water not being everywhere. Then again, drinks fountains are much more of a thing than e.g. over here. Of course, over here most if not all taps provide clean drinking water.
Bottled water is the number one selling packaged beverage in America. That's fucking stupid considering clean safe drinking water is abundant and ubiquitous in America.
I'll buy that it's the top seller, but are the majority of bottled drinks water? Because when I go to a convenience store there is usually one fridge for bottled water and several for all the other stuff (soda, tea, juice, Gatorade etc).
I don't think all of that really matters anyway, because the point I'm making is: anything that's bad about a plastic bottle filled with water surely must be just as bad for a plastic bottle filled with water and a little bit of sugar and coloring. Nobody has really addressed this, and I just think it's strange.
I'm fine with the idea that we should address this by drinking tap water instead of bottled water. All I'm saying is that surely the same goes for other bottled drinks as well.
Yes. As the top comment says, we need to switch to fully reusable & easily recyclable (eg not plastic) bottles, but water is the most obvious fucking stupid thing to put in a bottle, so we can start there.
Sprite isn't shipped very much in bottles. The soda companies are very good at shipping concentrate and then adding water locally. Bottled water is different in that the entire transport occurs as water.
I don’t believe your last sentence is correct in the case of brands like Dasani that are just filtered tap water. And for drinks other than water the bottles still have to get made and disposed of. Again, they are all just bottled water with a little bit of extra stuff in them, so whatever impact bottled water has, they all must have as well.
No, they're not. When someone says "I need a drink," reasonable people do not interpret that as "I literally cannot continue without immediate hydration."
>I don’t understand the focus specifically on water bottles when this comes up, seems like any drink bottle would be just as problematic.
I suspect people drink far more bottles of water than soda, simply based on the price of an entire flat of water compared to a 6-pack of 20 ounce sodas.
