I'm Done With Bottled Water

I'm not really sure what is a carbon footprint, but what I do know is the smaller the better. Since a hybrid car doesn't make great economic sense (I will not be gouged unless the car is some kind of Italian) and Whole Foods is too expensive for my everyday grocery shopping, I need to find other ways to be "greener".

That leads me to my decision regarding bottled water: I'm done with it. With prices that rival OPEC's, I'm not losing any sleep about it. This decision wasn't really born out of some sort of deep analysis or fact finding. It actually came about over pizza. I was having lunch at Mozza (yum!) and instead of exposing my frugality by the waiter asking, "Would you like sparkling or still for the table?", they just gave me their filtered water. How cool was that? Yeah, they still have the Pelligrino on the menu, but with their filtered water coming in such a cute bottle, who needs to pay more? And why should we? I know that by selling water, it's all profit for restaurants. (All drinks actually.) But if they're cool with serving up their tap stuff in lieu of more profit, I'm cool with drinking it.

This is what sealed it for me. The next day I hear on NPR (gosh, I'm turning into a yuppie) about the big marketing scheme with bottled water. Did you know that a lot of the stuff comes from tap? You can see it right there on the Dasani bottle label (or was it Aquafina?). Some come from the mountains, but where do you think tap comes from? Yeah, the mountains too! It also takes a crapload of water to make bottled water and the plastic it comes in. They need to ship those bottles around so think of the gas and emissions that accompany its delivery. That's a lot of waste for the same stuff I get from my kitchen faucet. Okay, Fiji water does come from Fiji, but damn, to bottle and ship it all the way over here? We're never going to be energy independent this way.

So there are actually many things that's affected by my embargo. I'm creating less waste since I don't have all those bottles to throw away. And I'm helping us use less oil from the transportation of those bottles. The bottles also need oil for its creation. But, most importantly, I save money for more useful and impactful things. Like spa days. Whoo hoo!