It’s not the water, it’s the bottle

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, August 3, 2007

Dave Churchill

For years, I had been in the habit of throwing a couple bottles of water in my gym bag. And when I travel, especially, I buy a lot of bottled water; because I travel for business at least a couple days almost every week, I end up buying a lot of bottled water.

For some reason, a month or two ago, the habit started to bother me. Like most everyone else, it has occurred to me that I am paying for something that I am getting for next-to-free from the City of Fergus Falls, from the motel where I’m staying, the water cooler at the office, wherever.

We live, after all, in the United States of America, a land where safe drinking water is something we can take pretty much for granted. So why buy when you can have it for free?

But really what bothered me most was the accumulation of plastic bottles. After a long drive, there was often a pile of them in the car. After a meeting at the office, a conference room waste-basket was full of bottles. And although the plastic is usually recyclable, bottled water is often purchased in situations where recycling isn’t going to happen.

Who, for instance, buys a plastic bottle of water at an outdoor festival and then puts the empty container in a recycling bin? Not many. Who buys one with lunch, while on a road trip, and then makes sure it gets recycled. Not many. One article I read said only about 12 percent of water bottles get recycled. In fact, plenty of people don’t even bother to find a trash can, and the bottles end up as litter.

Most plastic containers are petroleum products, plus they each took some measure of energy to form. So throwing them out, when water is available in the tap, seems like a waste of an ever-scarcer resource.

My own plan was to drink my water, in the future, from re-usable containers. But, just as with every plan, there’s a complication.

First, there is the rumor — about the risks of re-using water bottles. Do chemicals leach out of the bottles over time and poison the water therein? You can check out that rumor on-line, and find opinions supporting every angle of the subject. Even some kinds of plastic used in permanent water bottles — the kind that are meant to be re-used — may emit chemicals as they get older, or when they get heated up.

From what I can determine, bottles made of polyethylene are safe. They’re identified with a “2” inside a triangle, molded into the bottle’s bottom. Did the re-usable bottles I have accumulated over the years all have a “2” on them? Of course not.

Then there’s the convenience factor. We started stocking bottled water at our house a few years ago, even though we have a filtration system for the already-safe Fergus tap water, because the kids will drink bottled water. They will guzzle a bottle of water, instead of a can of pop, but they will absolutely never drink water from the tap. And doesn’t it seem better for kids to drink water instead of pop?

So this idea of abandoning bottled water, in favor of tap water, has become a lot more complicated than it at first seemed it would be — just as does every decision that involves moving away from the convenience of a petroleum-based lifestyle.

From food to fuel to water, oil-dependence is woven through the way we live. It is a scary realization, given that oil is someday going to go the way of the dinosaur.

What to do about the water bottles? How to maintain convenience without the waste? It will be an interesting problem to try to solve. But solve it — and the many other oil-based conundrums — we must.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.