Water War

The greens should go pack sand!

They will never be happy as they have no idea what they want.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things plastic water bottles are an extravagant use of limited energy resources. But I wonder how many days that our nations's annual energy use for plastic water bottles would run a single coal fired electric generating station.

In my house they are a simple luxury for my handicaped wife who has few pleasures in life beyond the enjoyment of a nice meal and something tasty to drink besides our bad tasting well water. She can handle the bottles herself without me having to frequently fill glasses for her. Things like that give her a sense of self sufficiency that has largely gone from her life.

Every single bottle gets recycled. I drink the well water and use the bottles to hold that water for my own drinking out in the shop and while outdoors managing our property. And those bottles always recycle. Every last one of them. The bottled water we buy also works well for batteries and other uses requiring distilled water.

I'm thinking the greenies will eventually bludgeon the politicians into banning water in small bottles. I don't think that will win a lot of friends to their cause. Then I'll go buy some permanent drinking water bottles, spend a pile of money on an RO system and plan on a disinfectant wash process for reusing the bottles. That's necessary for sanitary reasons.

Maybe the answer is to double or triple the "deposit" on these bottles. That is no problem for me. It would be a whole lot cheaper tying up money for a month or so in a couple of hundred bottles (say $30) than an investment of several hundred in a RO system.

Ed Weldon

Ah, yes. A bottle of water purchased at a store. Marketing's answer to "The Emperor's New Clothes"

An item I used to sell was the water cooler, or drinking fountain. When you stopped at a gasoline service station (now usually a Convenience Center), you could have a drink of water, compliments of the store you were patronizing. These were also common at grocery stores, schools, office buildings... just about everywhere. The facilities considered the pitch from water bottlers, "Why give it away, you paying for the electricity to cool the water as well as purchasing the equipment itself, when you can sell them a bottle of water for a dollar?" Remove the drinking fountain, make the water bottles available for sale, and listen to the cash register ring.

And thus the bottled water industry was born. BAH! There have been circumstances where I purchase water in a sometimes misguided belief it is better (while traveling, for example, and I know the local tap water gives me trouble), but domestic tap water is my usual selection. I have seen people order a bottle of water at a restaurant, and pour it over a glass of ice... Where do they think the ice came from?

Green bottles for water? How about no bottles for water.