Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Why Bottled Water ?

What is the deal with bottled water? I can basically only think of a few reasons for buying bottled water. Obviously if your local water tastes really awful, bottled water may be your only option, but in most places in the U.S. bottled water and tap water taste pretty much the same. I can understand that a lot of people want some bottled water on hand in case of an emergency, like an earthquake or an approaching hurricane. This makes a lot of sense, and when we lived in Florida bottled water became a scarce commodity in stores when a hurricane was heading our way. The only other truly justifiable reason to have bottled water is if you were traveling to a country whose water is questionable in terms of its purity. Better to drink bottled water instead of getting Montezuma‘s revenge.

In this day and age with the taking away our use of plastic bags in order to save the planet, why are plastic bottles not close to extinction? These days beer comes mostly in cans or glass bottles. Most soda comes in cans or less frequently in the larger liter plastic bottles, although I do not recall the last time I bought a liter bottle of soda.

What’s left? Which plastic bottles are the culprits? Plastic water bottles! Ah yes, you say, but each of these plastic bottles has a deposit of a nickel or a dime, and so are most likely recycled. You might think so, but actually this is not the case. Less than a third of six billion pounds of plastic most commonly used for drink bottles and food containers is recovered by U.S recycling programs! So what happens to the over two-thirds of this plastic that  is not recycled? Obviously most of this recycleable  plastic ends up as litter, or ends up in our landfills or in the oceans. 

Since it appears to me that non-recycled plastic bottles, especially plastic water bottles, are a much bigger problem than plastic bags, why have we banned the useful plastic bag and not the plastic bottle? (In general, if there seems to be an unanswerable question, always follow the money!) Lo-and-behold if you follow the money here, the answer becomes obvious. What do you think happens to those billions of nickels and dimes that were paid on those billions of plastic water bottles that never make it to recycling? The government gets to keep this money. It is really a tax that is not referred to as such. Perhaps if the state or the local government called it by its real name, “a tax,” maybe the people, especially the thirsty ones, would raise a ruckus. Oops, I forgot that in California, most of the voters are too dense and cannot understand anything that is basic economics even when they are the ones being screwed!

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