disposable plastic water bottles - not cool

BEAUTY AND THE BOTTLE

 Have you ever noticed how much energy is put into designing bottles? Go into either a liquor store or a perfume store, and take a look at the beautiful shapes, textures and colours that are used to create the bottle. In more than a few instances, the cost of the package is much more than the cost of the contents. This shows that we care about beauty, and how much we care is often a reflection of the value we place on the contents.

 Now take a look at a throw away plastic water bottle. There are two strange things here: first, the fact that it looks like (and is) a piece of garbage would indicate that the quality of the contents is pretty ordinary. Second, and truly weird, is the incongruity of someone who cares enough about how they look to spend large dollars on handbags, shoes, clothes, jewelry, watches, cool phones, sunglasses, cars, ties, haircuts, cosmetics….is also willing to be seen walking around (and if they are a celebrity, photographed) carrying and drinking out of something as ugly, cheap, nasty, low rent and generally trashy as a plastic water bottle.

How does this disconnect happen? Do we all have an inability to see ourselves when we do this? Can you imagine a social convention that had all of us wear garbage bags over our Hugo Boss suits to protect them from the dust? Or making ourselves up perfectly for a formal evening and then using an old plastic shopping bag as a purse? It wouldn’t happen, yet the accessory of the noughties was the water bottle, and its most pervasive expression was the one made to throw away.







 For myself, I can’t imagine buying one of them, or carrying one. It has become such a symbol of the ugly consumer, the loud American or Australian who is completely unaware of where they are and what they are doing.  It is a symbol of something ugly that is also intrinsically ugly, and because I am, potentially, a living sculpture, I am going to match my wonderfully beautiful gear with something wonderfully beautiful – a refillable water bottle.












And then I am going to fill it with the ultimate in chic contents – Great Australian Tap Water.

I invite you to join me.

Tap water -  get something real into you

Changing Consumer Behavior One Water Bottle at a Time

Bottled water and oil - the Gulf of Mexico draws a parallel.

From an article by John Edson for Fast Company:

"....It's especially poignant to think about this relationship between oil and water in this post-Gulf-Coast-oil-disaster moment.

Water is good. Water is bad.

Ads from Evian and Brita

While we all know this, bottled water is super-convenient. It's not that we want to harm the planet, or think that our immediate need or ongoing healthy habits (water kicks soda's butt for hydration, right?) are more important. It's just that we're busy, and the bottled water is there--and we promise ourselves that we'll recycle the empties.

The fact is that tap water in my country (and probably yours if you're reading this) is super duper. If we only had a way to open the tap, grab a slug of it, put it in our pocket and dispense it at will, we'd have the convenient water that we need accessible when we want it. Fast Company did a fantastic piece about the bottled water industry here, pointing to just how this became such a thriving entity. 

Design--or design thinking, if you prefer--is tackling this problem, if not the impending problem of global drinking water shortage, in a number of inspiring ways that aim to start with the need, provide alternatives, and empower behavior change in us all......." 

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