I’ve always tried to make these blog posts positive. I try to think of things to post that make me feel good and that add meaning to my days. However, sometimes things I see outside are not positive and I feel compelled to talk about them. Today, in one of the cleanest communities in which we’ve lived, along one of what has to be one of the most scenic highways in our U.S.A., I was overcome with the sights and smells of garbage in the drainage ditch along the LOVR (Los Osos Valley Road). I did some research and scribbled down some thoughts. This post is not about anything I percieve as positive or inspirational.
Every day, millions of Americans leave grocery, department and big box stores with cases of plastic bottles filled with a primal substance – drinking water. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of our municipal water systems produce safe, clean and very cheap drinking water. It sounds stupid that a sane person would ever forgo municipal water and purchase a case of plastic bottles full of water of unknown origin only to end up throwing most of it away in the form of a non-reuseable container? Sounds stupid because it is.
According to the “How Stuff Works” website, the volume of bottled water sold in the U.S. in 2021 was almost 16 billion gallons. Thats 128 billion 16 oz bottles or 64 billion quart bottles or more every year. A 32 oz milk bottle I found – I’m reusing it in my kitchen – weighed 1.375 ounces. Do the math and that’s 5.5 billion pounds – 2.75 million tons – of plastic. Just for water. If we are lucky most of that goes into landfills. Recycling has been and continues to be a failure. Anyone who is paying attention knows that much of this volume of plastic goes into the ditches, waterways and any niche that is not constantly cleaned by maintenance crews. One source, The “Oceana” website, indicates that around 33% of plastics – a staggering amount of pounds per year – escape the system of recycling or landfilling. And we’ve all heard about plastics in our oceans – the final resting place of much of our plastic. Statistics vary but all point to a dismal reality. I anecdotally and unscientifically predict that the United States and the oceans within reach of it’s watersheds, will be completely covered by a layer of plastic stench by 2050. What a legacy for our young people!
This stack of bottles – pictured below – was placed in the front door of the Target store near our home to lure unthinking customers. While I was taking this picture shown below, an elderly man placed two cases – 48 pint bottles – on his shopping cart and happily walked toward the register. All the while, hidden way in the back of the store was a shelf full of different water filtering devices. We own the Brita filter (more plastic, of course). While we have wonderful drinking water from the tap in our community, running it through the Brita filter does seem to remove the objection of one my family members has to drinking tap water and her insistence that the mystery liquid in the throw-away plastic bottles is better. The San Luis Obispo water district publishes a website with all the details of the source, treatment and delivery of their water. They even offer tours of their facilities and water quality reports all the way back to 2008 for any concerned citizen. The bottles at Target are just labeled “purified” with no further explaination along with a disclaimer by Target that they are not responsible for the contents of the bottles. Which water would a sane person choose?
If you visit the “purified” link above to access the Healthline website, you’ll find a description of how purified water is defined. A visit to the SLO water district website describes an identical process to produce the tap water we pour from our faucet.
I can already hear the whining. Oh, but the little bottles are so convenient… Oh, but I drink more water because I keep a little plastic bottle near me at work or home or in the car… Oh, but I have an emergency supply in case something happens to the water supply… Oh, but RFK said that … All of these concerns and more could be allayed by simply using a Brita (or similar) filter to process water from your faucet and reuseable containers to store it. I use milk jugs (more plastic, of course). That said, your water from your faucet is very likely drinkable without any futher treatment – unless you are a RFK follower. By the way, there was no information on the Target water regarding flouride – one of RFK’s major conspiracy claims – but the SLO water district does address this on their website very clearly and in detail. A further Google search resulted in no sourcing or test information on flouride or anything else in the Target bottled water.
It seems that modern humans cannot avoid single use plastics. If I became king tomorrow, they would be illegal the following day. Plastic would have to be used only for long lasting, reuseable products and have a pre-production approved (by me), bulletproof plan for recycling at the end of their life span. There would be a law that water, soda, milk, or other products could never be consumed in single use bottles – plastic or otherwise. Sound difficult? Really? Maybe our current oligarchs could spend less time sending objects into space or spreading lies and more time trying to solve problems here on the surface. Oh, but that’d be too boring. Maybe sending the oligarchs into space would go a long way towards finding some solutions.
I’ll die happy if I can convince just one person to stop buying products like the one in the photo. I applaud anyone that woud stop using these ridiculous water bottles and please, please try to convince one or two other people that you know to do the same. We cannot continue to go down this road of injecting massive volumes of plastic into our environment. Please…… And yes, I know that this is a small thing (actually #5 on this list) when compared to the entirety of the wasteful, environmentally horrible things people do – like the data center that stores the contents of this website as one example. Just be concious and try to help. Please…….
In 10 years, I’d like to write a positive, inspirational post about how this horribly wasteful trend had been reversed and replaced with a sustainable, common sense approach to drinking water – the substance so neccessary for all of our well being.
Plastic insanity
1.375 oz quart plastic bottle