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Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Message in a Bottle ~ 3rd installment
From the start, Nevins pioneered a three-part strategy. First, he connected bottled water to exclusivity: In 1977, just before Perrier's U.S. launch, he flew 60 journalists to France to visit "the source" where Perrier bubbled out of the ground. He connected Perrier to health, sponsoring the New York City Marathon, just as long-distance running was exploding as a fad across America. And he associated Perrier with celebrity, launching with $4 million in TV commercials featuring Orson Welles. It worked. In 1978, its first full year in the United States, Perrier sold $20 million of water. The next year, sales tripled to $60 million.
What made Perrier distinctive was that it was a sparkling water, served in a signature glass bottle. But that's also what left the door open for Evian, which came to the United States in 1984. Evian's U.S. marketing was built around images of toned young men and women in tight clothes sweating at the gym. Madonna drank Evian--often onstage at concerts. "If you were cool, you were drinking bottled water," says Ed Slade, who became Evian's vice president of marketing in 1990. "It was a status symbol."
Evian was also a still water, which Americans prefer; and it was the first to offer a plastic bottle nationwide. The clear bottle allowed us to see the water--how clean and refreshing it looked on the shelf. Americans have never wanted water in cans, which suggest a tinny aftertaste before you take a sip. The plastic bottle, in fact, did for water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time.
Perrier and Evian launched the bottled-water business just as it would prove irresistible. Convenience and virtue aligned. Two-career families, overprogrammed children, prepared foods in place of home-cooked meals, the constant urging to eat more healthfully and drink less alcohol--all reinforce the value of bottled water. But those trends also reinforce the mythology.
We buy bottled water because we think it's healthy. Which it is, of course: Every 12-year-old who buys a bottle of water from a vending machine instead of a 16-ounce Coke is inarguably making a healthier choice. But bottled water isn't healthier, or safer, than tap water. Indeed, while the United States is the single biggest consumer in the world's $50 billion bottled-water market, it is the only one of the top four--the others are Brazil, China, and Mexico--that has universally reliable tap water. Tap water in this country, with rare exceptions, is impressively safe. It is monitored constantly, and the test results made public. Mineral water has a long association with medicinal benefits--and it can provide minerals that people need--but there are no scientific studies establishing that routinely consuming mineral water improves your health. The FDA, in fact, forbids mineral waters in the United States from making any health claims.
If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
And for this healthy convenience, we're paying what amounts to an unbelievable premium. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
Taste, of course, is highly personal. New Yorkers excepted, Americans love to belittle the quality of their tap water. But in blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperatures, presented in identical glasses, ordinary people can rarely distinguish between tap water, springwater, and luxury waters. At the height of Perrier's popularity, Bruce Nevins was asked on a live network radio show one morning to pick Perrier from a lineup of seven carbonated waters served in paper cups. It took him five tries.
We are actually in the midst of a second love affair with bottled water. In the United States, many of the earliest, still-familiar brands of springwater--Poland Spring, Saratoga Springs, Deer Park, Arrowhead--were originally associated w
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Message in a Bottle
From an article at Fast Company
The largest bottled-water factory in North America is located on the outskirts of Hollis, Maine. In the back of the plant stretches the staging area for finished product: 24 million bottles of Poland Spring water. As far as the eye can see, there are double-stacked pallets packed with half-pint bottles, half-liters, liters, "Aquapods" for school lunches, and 2.5-gallon jugs for the refrigerator.
Really, it is a lake of Poland Spring water, conveniently celled off in plastic, extending across 6 acres, 8 feet high. A week ago, the lake was still underground; within five days, it will all be gone, to supermarkets and convenience stores across the Northeast, replaced by another lake's worth of bottles.
Looking at the piles of water, you can have only one thought: Americans sure are thirsty.
Bottled water has become the indispensable prop in our lives and our culture. It starts the day in lunch boxes; it goes to every meeting, lecture hall, and soccer match; it's in our cubicles at work; in the cup holder of the treadmill at the gym; and it's rattling around half-finished on the floor of every minivan in America. Fiji Water shows up on the ABC show Brothers & Sisters; Poland Spring cameos routinely on NBC's The Office. Every hotel room offers bottled water for sale, alongside the increasingly ignored ice bucket and drinking glasses. At Whole Foods , the upscale emporium of the organic and exotic, bottled water is the number-one item by units sold.
Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets--$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.
Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We--a generation raised on tap water and water fountains--drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we're raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We've come to pay good money--two or three or four times the cost of gasoline--for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes.
When we buy a bottle of water, what we're often buying is the bottle itself, as much as the water. We're buying the convenience--a bottle at the 7-Eleven isn't the same product as tap water, any more than a cup of coffee at Starbucks is the same as a cup of coffee from the Krups machine on your kitchen counter. And we're buying the artful story the water companies tell us about the water: where it comes from, how healthy it is, what it says about us. Surely among the choices we can make, bottled water isn't just good, it's positively virtuous.
Except for this: Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)
Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water "varieties" from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.
A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it's just a bottle of water--modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don't need--when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation--it's worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote everywhere suggest.
In the town of San Pellegrino Terme, Italy, for example, is a spigot that runs all the time, providing San Pellegrino water free to the local citizens--except the free Pellegrino has no bubbles. Pellegrino trucks in the bubbles for the bottling plant. The man who first brought bottled water to the United States famously failed an impromptu taste test involving his own product. In Maine, there is a marble temple to honor our passion for bottled water.
continued tomorrow
Sunday, August 22, 2010
HOW BOTTLED WATER IS CHEAP
I’m walking the Larapinta Trail. It runs west from Alice Springs, out along the Macdonnell Ranges for over 200 km. It is a privilege to be doing this; to be passing through this country day after day, and everywhere, all the time, I am conscious of how fragile life is. For a flower, a bird, a lizard, a tree to survive here is a little bit of a miracle. My own survival is also precarious – much more so than I realize when I am in the city. A sprained ankle, a snake bight, a wrong turn in the trail could finish me off.
And then there is water. Sometimes I have t walk 35 km between water sources. For two days, I need to carry at least 8 litres – 8 kilograms – of water on my back. And I am reliant on there being water in the hole or the tank at the other end. If it does not, I am again just a whisker away from dying.
In truth, it is the same in the city. I rely on being able to turn on the tap, and I never think that water will not come out. But if it didn’t, if I could not get water, I would die in a few days. This is how important Water is to our lives. It is what we are made of, more than any other substance.
Out here in the desert I am much more aware of how important it is, how perhaps only air is more immediate to my survival. Water – simple, mostly unnoticed – is really a treasure beyond almost anything else in value. It is priceless, yet it is free. And it is free also in spirit – it moves through this earth like Gaia’s lifeblood. It runs, falls, rises, flows. It is almost a perfect metaphor for purity and vitality and freedom.
When we put water into a plastic bottle, all this is lost. It becomes a commodity that some have and others do not. It is poisoned with PCP’s and other chemicals. It is held – still and lifeless and contained – its qualities of life completely suppressed.
Out here in the desert, where the real value of water has meaning, it is easy to see that the whole story of water has been terribly cheapened and twisted by the process of commodification. This is the spiritual travesty of bottled water – so hard to see in the city, where everything has its price, but so simple and obvious in the desert where nothing has value like water.
Unbottled water – let your water be free.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Find another way to carry water
Concordia receives a message on bottles: Find another way to carry water
Thursday, August 12, 2010
some bottled water facts
did you know..
from an article at bottledwateralliance
More than a billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water. In Australia, we have the luxury of quality tap water, yet despite this:
- Australians spend more than half a billion dollars a year on bottled water. Last year, the sale of bottled water increased by 10 percent.
- Producing and delivering a litre of bottled water can emit hundreds of times moregreenhouse gases than a litre of tap water.
- According to British research, drinking one bottle of water has the sameenvironmental impact as driving a car for a kilometre.
- In many cases, a litre of bottled water is more expensive than a litre of petrol.
- Department of Environment and Climate Change estimates that 200ml of oil is used to produce, package, transport and refrigerate each litre bottle of bottled water. As a result, at least 50 million litres of oil are used in the manufacture and distribution of bottled water in Australia every year.
- Australia recycles only 36% of PET plastic drink bottles.
- In South Australia, which has Container Deposit Legislation, the plastic bottle recycling rate is 74%. A 2007 national Newspoll commissioned by Clean Up Australia found that those polled 82% support a CDL scheme of 10c on bottles.
- Australia’s annual use of bottled water generates more than 60,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions - the same amount that 13,000 cars generate over the course of a year.
Monday, August 9, 2010
How can we keep doing it?
The evidence against the use of plastics for ANYTHING disposable is now overwhelming. Plastics are made from oil. Oil is a resource millions of years in the making and that has been largely used up in just 100 years. Once oil is out of the ground, no matter what you do with it, it is a problem. This can manifest as an oil spill – and the Gulf of Mexico is just the “Ben Hur” of something that goes on every day. It can be when we burn the oil and create air pollutants and greenhouse gas. It can be when we make petrochemical fertilizers and basically “mine” our farmland, leaving it dead and depleted after a few years. It can be in polymers and plastics, which are used for a very short time and then break into tiny particles that, asbestos like, dissipate throughout the environment causing damage in ways we will never know – that prize understanding will be for some distant future generations, who will also have the task of cleaning up or trying to live with our mess.
So how, knowing this, can we keep doing it? How come we are so perverse, so “easy going” in our treatment of the only place in the universe where we can have a life? What stops us using just a little bit of our personal energy and doing whatever it takes to NEVER buy throw away plastics? Because that is what it takes. That is what we need to do, much more than just “get through the day.” More than pay the mortgage, more than cope with another emergency. We need to understand very clearly the difference between what is urgent and what is important. It is important to stop using plastic throw away bottles. Really simple. It is important to take that understanding and slowly expand it to apply to other forms of plastic, and then other unnecessary but “easy” uses of oil. It is important to see, we are just the dust of this earth, made into humans for a little while, and then all our molecules will rejoin the dust again.
This is our earth. We are it, and we are killing it. It is important to stop this self abuse.
Tap Water – get something real into you.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Plastic water bottles: still a problem
Revisiting the issue, recapping the dangers, highlighting easy solutions
from an article at greeningofoil
BY STEPHANIE DROSTE-PACKHAM FOR GREENING OF OIL
That clear, resilient material that we just can’t live without is derived from petroleum. We all knew that. But let’s talk about plastic water bottles. Why are we suddenly concerned about drinking from these bottles made from our favorite dependable shiny stuff?
If you were smart in the ’80s you invested in any of the many plastic to-gos we call “bottled water.” Dasani by Coca Cola, Aquafina by PepsiCo, Deer Park by Nestle, all would have been fine choices for your investment dollar.
Now sales are dropping. Even if sales are down because of the economy, they’ll hopefully stay down for the sake of our environment and your health.
Plastic water bottles made from petroleum are not meant to be reused. That alone makes the product a nemesis to the environment. They clog our landfills, our streams, and even swirl and dance around in the ever-growing Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Putting our concerns for our environment on hold for a moment, I know it’s tough, but you still deserve to ask, “What about me?” There are health risks to buying all those water bottles that continue to lead so many to choose aluminum, stainless steel and glass over plastic.
The thin polycarbonate plastic of water bottles breaks down. Red flag number one: they aren’t meant to be reused, and decompose in the heat of your car or dishwasher. Thin plastic also breaks down over time. Red flag number two: as the plastic decomposes, it begins to look etched. According to the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unitpolycarbonate plastic leaches pthalates and bisphenol-A (two known endocrine disruptors) into the water you’re drinking.
The National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences explains that an endocrine disruptor mimics estrogen, the female sex hormone, and “may result in human health effects including lowered fertility and an increased incidence of endometriosis and some cancers.”
Bisphenol-A was one of the 75 new chemicals measured by the Center of Disease Control and Prevention in 2009. “CDC scientists found bisphenol-A in more than 90 percent of the urine samples representative of the U.S. population.” Now, in my book 90 percent on a test is good news, but reading that had me cringing.
News reports and scientific reports tell us how to avoid exposure to these chemicals.
Nalgene, a leader in reusable plastic water bottle sales, introduced their BPA-free bottle in 2008. Since then, there has been an explosion of non-plastic water bottles in all shapes, sizes, in stainless steel and aluminum. I personally have an aluminum bottle and love it.
The bottom line is: The thinner the plastic the more readily it breaks down and leaches, which is bad for you. But get this, the thicker the plastic, the more petroleum was used, the longer it takes to break down, the worse for our environment. Talk about lose-lose.
But there’s a win-win!
This is one of the easiest global problems to fix on a personal level. Remember your “Just Say No!” days with D.A.R.E? Evoke that memory next time you’re in the grocery store looking at the pack of 24 individual doses of water. You can easily and cheaply sport the latest colors of durables to quench your thirst. Many can even be found for less than ten dollars.
Reusablebags.com is a great source for not just bottles in any price range, but for other earth-friendly, reusable personal items. And if you want to make it a little more personal you can customize a Sigg water bottle, it’s a really cool gift or a great way to promote your business or organization.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Plastic bottles and free choice -
One thing Australian's like to pride themselves on, rightly, is their independent nature. The smart Ozy, tough when it matters, generous but not wasteful, and above all, able to see through a scam - to not have the wool pulled over our eyes, avoid raw prawns, and in general make up our own minds. Yet here we are, each spending hundreds of dollars a year on bottled water even AFTER we've spent hundreds of millions getting great tap water into nearly every building and every tap in the country. Here we are buying - paying for - plastic bottles that we throw away after 10 or 20 minutes. Here we are spending thousands of times what we need to for drinking water, even when tests show us that bottled and tap are basically the same product. Plain old water, for God's sake, costing more than petrol! And we are right in there, being ripped off for hundreds of dollars a year, over and over!
How come? How do we allow this to happen? What has turned us into a nation full of patsies, of easy marks for well dressed con artists? It is like someone came to town, filled up a bottle with something we already had, told us it was a miracle that would make us healthy, put a 3000% mark up on it....... and we believed them!! We buy it! Over and over!
The only reason that I can think of, is that we have lost touch with a sense of our own selves. We are being led in a kind of dream. We have forgotten the qualities we pride ourselves on, hypnotized and dazzled by dreams on billboards and screens, our own ability to choose has been hijacked by slick talkers. It made me realize that free choice is not automatic. It can't be given to me - even by Australia, or mateship, or education. It is something I have to - that's right - CHOOSE! I have to decide I want it, and then take it. Otherwise, there are plenty of shysters out there who will take lassitude as a licence to take me, and my money, for a ride. So, you choose. Follow the plastic bottle fantasy of those who make a mark of you, or dump the plastic bottle and grab your own future.
Tap water - get something real into you.
An article by: Dipak Ramsay
The only reason that I can think of, is that we have lost touch with a sense of our own selves. We are being led in a kind of dream. We have forgotten the qualities we pride ourselves on, hypnotized and dazzled by dreams on billboards and screens, our own ability to choose has been hijacked by slick talkers. It made me realize that free choice is not automatic. It can't be given to me - even by Australia, or mateship, or education. It is something I have to - that's right - CHOOSE! I have to decide I want it, and then take it. Otherwise, there are plenty of shysters out there who will take lassitude as a licence to take me, and my money, for a ride. So, you choose. Follow the plastic bottle fantasy of those who make a mark of you, or dump the plastic bottle and grab your own future.
Tap water - get something real into you.
An article by: Dipak Ramsay
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Giving bottled water the Boot
A story about a collaboration by 28 NSW Shires to reduce waste by a public campaign called "Tap Water, Please." There is great momentum for the unbottled movement across all demographics.
Tap water please but bring your own bottle
01 Jul, 2010 11:30 AM
Blayney Shire residents will miss out on the free reusable drink bottles distributed as part of NetWaste’s ‘Tap Water Please’ campaign as the Blayney Shire Council doesn’t have a provision in their budget to purchase them, director of environmental services Paul O’Brien said.The campaign, launched in a TV and radio ad campaign across the Central West on Monday, aims to make people think before they drink and cut back on their consumption and purchase of bottled water.Out of the 28 NetWaste councils that were invited to distribute the bottles only 11 took up the offer, NetWaste’s environmental learning adviser Sue Clarke said.
“The other councils are putting up posters to show their support because we made the decision to run the campaign right over the NetWaste region,” she said.
“Different councils have to make their own decisions.”As well as costing more than tap water plastic water bottles also have negative environmental impacts with only 35 per cent being recycled.
“The really good thing is the message being promoted to get people to think about some of the consequences of bottled water,” she said. Ms Clarke said so far 4,000 of the reusable, recyclable, Australian-made bottles had been distributed across the region with each council getting about 300 bottles.“We’ve had a huge response,” she said.“I’ve had so many phone calls. It’s been wonderful.”
Councils in Bathurst, Orange, Cabonne, Cowra, Forbes, Parkes, Dubbo, Wellington, Warren, Lithgow and Narromine are giving the bottles away as part of the campaign.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
FOUR YEARS. GO.
This is a link. Click on it to visit a site that aims to change the course of history. Really.
FOUR YEARS. GO.
FOUR YEARS. GO.
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