Why you shouldn't buy bottled water.
--pws
from http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/22/pure_water_right_on_tap/
Pure water, right on tap
Do you know where the water in that bottle of Aquafina comes from?
Pristine, snowy mountains like the ones on the label, perhaps?
A virgin aquifer protected for centuries by layers of rock and ice in Norway, perchance?
An underground lake on the edge of a primitive rainforest on a Pacific island, possibly?
Ayer, actually.
As in Ayer, Massachusetts. Best known for mills, railroads, and a former military base. And the water comes not from some gently burbling spring in a picturesque valley, either, but from the municipal water supply. Which pumps a slightly less-filtered but equally safe version of that same water into residents' homes for a quarter of one cent per gallon.
Still, we chug down buckets of the pricier stuff.
Nationally, we'll drop $16 billion on bottled water this year. That's 27.6 gallons for each of us. Since most of the bottles it comes in never get recycled, we're helping to clog landfills with 4 billion pounds of plastic annually. And when you consider the energy it takes to make and move those bottles into and around the United States, you might as well fill a quarter of every single one of them with oil.
Meanwhile, Boston is one of just five cities in the country with tap water so pure that it's exempt from Environmental Protection Agency filtration requirements. And even after the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority's recent rate hike, it costs less than a half-cent a gallon.
Which all adds up to a waste of money and space that rivals Paris Hilton.
All of this bad press is churned out by Corporate Accountability International, a national group based in the South End that is trying to get Americans to kick the bottled water habit.
One sunny afternoon last week, the group's volunteers were in Copley Square, challenging passersby to take a blind taste test to see if they could tell the difference between bottled and municipal water. Hardly anybody could, even when the choice was between tap water and Poland Spring, which comes directly from underground aquifers.
Ryan Jones, a Poland Spring man, was outraged after he flunked the test.
"What the hell?" said the 30-year-old. "I'll keep my dollar and buy some cookies. Those guys are making a fortune off of nothing!"
Jones has more and more company in city halls across America. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom just nixed bottled water for City Hall employees, which was costing $500,000 a year. He is spending some of the money on a campaign to promote the city's tap water (also given the EPA honor). City officials in Salt Lake City and Ann Arbor, Mich., are moving in the same direction. A few fancy restaurants in San Francisco and New York City have stopped offering bottled water altogether.
So what about Boston?
Mayor Thomas M. Menino is a big fan of the city's water. He calls it "Boston Ale," and he'd like everybody else to drink more of it too.
But last year, his employees bypassed City Hall bubblers and drank $100,000 worth of water supplied by Nestle.
He should cancel the boutique water orders.
But if you're going to encourage people to cut down on something as convenient as bottled water, you have to give them an alternative. So how about putting that hundred grand into more public drinking fountains, which seem to have gone the way of the pay phone? Or maybe fix the ones that long ago stopped dispensing water and now seem to function primarily as public art? Or how about using that famously strong mayoral arm to pressure restaurants to stop pushing the fancy stuff?
After all, if Boston were one of five top cities in the country in practically any other realm, wouldn't Menino be shouting it from mountaintops like the ones on the Aquafina bottle?
The answer is as clear as his Boston Ale.
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