Water

6/16/2014

Back when I was a young'en, water came from faucets - period.  And nobody I knew, including myself, ever sat down to have a glass of water.  Are you kidding me?  If I was drinking anything, it would have been a soda w/ice.

Today, water has a completely different story.  I don't care where you go, you will see most people carrying a bottle of water that they have either bought or brought from home.  The idea of buying water seems foreign to me, but then I'm lucky that the water in my house tastes good, considering that water has no taste at all!

People are now spending over a Billion dollars a year on water.  That's a lot of water and generates a lot of money for the companies that bottle and sell water.  So here's some fun facts for you:

For every bottle of water costing $1.50, the company gets a profit of fifty cents.  If you tallied that up we're talking about a lot of money on something as simple as water.  It costs from 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon to purchase bottled water than it does to purchase a gallon of average tap water. For example, in California average tap water costs about $1.60 per thousand gallons and bottled water costs about $.90 cents per gallon.   Expensive imported water sold in smaller bottles can cost several thousand times more than tap water: That $1.50 half-liter bottle of imported water may be costing you 10,000 times more per gallon than your tap water.  And it's just water we're talking about.

I have, when parched, and away from home, buy a bottle of water.  Once home, I refill the bottle with tap water (horrors), put it back in the fridge and I'm good to go the next time I want to take water with me.  I am not a water "snob", who will only drink bottled water and/or flavored water.  If I want flavored water, I take out a few slices of frozen lemons and plop them into the glass, and lemons are cheap.

Those bottles of "pure" water are just packaged to draw consumers in.  You can't be sure that the water inside those bottles really comes from a bubbling stream somewhere in Switzerland. The manufacturers just want us to think it does.

Each day in the US, more than 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away. Most end up in landfills or incinerators, and millions litter streets, parks and waterways.
What happens to plastic single-serving water bottles after they’re drained?  Only about one in six plastic water bottles sold in the US in 2004 was recycled, leading to a national recycling rate of about 17%.  Makes you wonder what happens to the other 83 percent of bottles.

I don't recycle my bottles - I reuse them.  There are always several bottles of ice cold water sitting in the refrigerator ready to go when I need/want them.
So drink up people, water's good for you.

P
P.S. folks, I'm having some editing issues with this post.  Apologies!