Bottled water 'is immoral'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/17/eawater117.xml

by getp • 18 years ago

15 44 18 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

hugh2• 18 years ago

"Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser"

Yeah, and I think that telling other people what to do with their lives in order to prevent the emission of miniscule amounts of CO2 should be as unfashionable as smoking too, but hell, what would I know?

gruseom2• 18 years ago

I have a little theory about this. When one issue moves into the mainstream, the avant-garde of the self-righteous find a new issue to focus on. They need to, in order to preserve their identity of being distinct from (morally superior to) the masses. It's analogous to music hipsters who immediately discard a band when it becomes popular.

yters• 18 years ago

It's funny how "morality" is trendy.

- EDIT -

quotes around morality

bocajuniors2• 18 years ago

if you cause harm to others, and are aware that you do so, you act immorally.

hugh2• 18 years ago

On the other hand, I did think it was pretty silly the other day when I saw water from New Zealand for sale here in California. Loading water onto a ship to ship it across more water to sell in a place which already has plenty of water seems pretty wasteful.

But I said "silly", not "immoral".

icky• 18 years ago

> Loading water onto a ship to ship it across more water to sell in a place which already has plenty of water seems pretty wasteful.

Gee, I thought we were talking about California, for a second.

Tichy2• 18 years ago

If there are externalities, they should be fixed. That is not telling other people what to do with their lives, it is telling them to not steal from others.

Not sure why the CO2 aspect doesn't get regulated through the prize of fuel, though.

boucher3• 18 years ago

Because the price of fuel doesn't account for the damage fuel consumptions costs in the long run.

We do very little to assess and monetize the environmental damage corporations cause, especially over the long term.

geebee• 18 years ago

The problem to he here is that the price of bottled water doesn't (evidently) reflect the true cost.

Driving a hummer, drinking bottled water, eating a big steak, taking airplanes everywhere. No prob, just pay for it. The price of these activities should be high enough that everyone is just delighted when someone does it, because the amount paid back into the commons makes it a great deal for everyone else.

That would end the moralizing, which doesn't make much sense in the first place (and is truly a hopeless way to influence anyone other than the choir anyway)

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Some related commentary

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_s...

jsjenkins168• 18 years ago

What exactly causes the 600x CO2 increase from production of bottled water vs. tap water? Creating the plastic bottle?

Tichy2• 18 years ago

Presumably driving it around in trucks?

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Both, probably. Both plastic and the cost of shipping scale roughly with the cost of petroleum.

ckinnan• 18 years ago

Part of the problem is that our socialized, monopoly municipal water suppliers provide unhealthy, bad tasting water.

foonamefoo• 18 years ago

A bigger part of the problem is the placebo effect.

RobinMessage• 18 years ago

My water tastes good and given the small amount of residual chlorine, is unlikely to be unhealthy. That's in the UK; whereabout are you talking about?

If the taste of the water really bothers you, in the UK they sell large water jugs which fill through charcoal filters (Brita), which remove any chlorine taste and only needed changing monthly or so.

boucher3• 18 years ago

The United States has excellent drinking water, pretty much everywhere. Issues of taste are usually caused by old pipes on the "last mile" of the water's path. So, buy a Brita filter. That's a market that actually makes sense.

Electro3• 18 years ago

IMO Brita filtered water tastes worse than the water out of the tap. My parents bemoan unfiltered water, I'm the opposite. For the life of me I can't drink filtered water because I don't find it refreshing as it taste clinically sterile.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

Well the way I look at this, we're paying for it right? Supply and demand, people.

brlittle3• 18 years ago

Actually, the argument being made is that you're _not_ paying for it. The externalities -- degraded environment, pollution, economic damage, etc. -- are being passed on to the powerless in other countries, or to future generations. In economic jargon (or as much thereof as I remember from college) there are negative externalities which are unaccounted for in the current market price.

I believe one of the arguments being made is also that if those externalities _were_ incorporated into the price, bottled water would be much less appealing on the basis of cost.

davidw• 18 years ago

Precisely. The 'correct' thing to do to strike a balance between freedom and preventing damage is to levy a tax to 'cancel out' the externality. If people really, really want their bottled water, they'll be free to buy it, but factored into that price will be the true costs.

That's the theory, anyway. Calculating those costs may not always be obvious.

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

FTFA:

'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'

And?

How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?

Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals for consumption?

Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?

This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the choice of battles to fight seems goofy.

brlittle3• 18 years ago

You know, the questions you're asking are valid. But one might well ask "When there are other sources of clean, potable water available, why is it necessary, or even desirable, to drink water imported all the way from Fiji." Is Fijian water qualitatively that much better than it justifies the relatively monumental effort of transporting it to Manhattan for consumption?

I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions.

Electro3• 18 years ago

Well I'm going to do my part to save the environment. I'll cycle to work; thus eating more food and respiring less efficiently and producing more CO2. I'll also eat more healthily, get more greens in me and protein; thus producing more methane which is 25 times worse than CO2 emissions.

Also, for when I do need to drive, I'll switch to a hybrid. However, that requires a large amount of lead and acids that are extremely harmful to the environment and it also takes more energy to produce an hybrid car than is actually saved in the average use of the car.

I will personally help destroy the environment by doing EVERYTHING I've been told should SAVE IT. I fucking love irony!

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

"I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions."

Quite true. My main issue was with the scant detail in the article, which assumes the reader should simply accept the proclamation of harm.

Had the article focused more on the more important matter of taking responsibility for the extended consequences of one's actions it would be harder to be dismissed out of hand.

Better results may be gained by provoking some introspection than by taking the moral high ground and attempting to shame people into acting a certain way. Even if shame works, the behavior is less likely to stick around.

ivankirigin3• 18 years ago

Bottled water "is portable"

boucher3• 18 years ago

so are reusable water bottles that cost about as much as one bottle of water would have cost.

ivankirigin3• 18 years ago

No, they don't cost nearly as much as a single bottle of water. I buy bottled water in bulk.

I also use a reusable plastic bottle. I don't have it with me all the time.

Bottled water is like SUVs and large homes for upper middle class people. People get irrationally pissed about them and ignore much more important things related to the environment, like single pane windows and other poor insulation. The difference between an SUV and a prius is small compared to the energy lost in a poorly insulated home in New England or Arizona.

[edit: don't forget to account for the energy of washing the reusable bottle. I've heard for a ceramic mug you need to use it 1000 times before it uses less energy than 1000 styrofoam cups]

spot35• 18 years ago

It's potable as well

ivankirigin3• 18 years ago

Yah, as soon as I wrote it I wanted to start a brand "portable potable".

tocomment• 18 years ago

So what should one drink while driving long distances? Will they install water fountains at gas stations?

wallflower2• 18 years ago

A doctor told me that if you don't have a water filter, you are the water filter. That being said, the difference between the quality of most municipal tap water and bottled water is marketing dollars. In some countries, it is a fact that you have to boil the water before drinking it. I was so nervous about avoiding sickness on my last trip to a Latin American country that I used bottled water (on my doctor's recommendation) to rinse out my toothbrush and avoided salad.

wallflower2• 18 years ago

This reminds me of the people who shop at Whole Foods yet dont recycle and celebrities who drive hybrid cars yet live in 10k sq. ft. houses where the AC/heating bill is hundreds/month. Classic human paradox of how hard it is to do everything right and/or people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

Bottled water 'is immoral'

Related Stories