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This just hurts to read... It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact
by cstrat 7y ago
This just hurts to read...
It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact many of the branded bottles of water are not spring water but bottled tap water.
- bsaul 7y agothis story i keep hearing about tap water beeing just as good as bottle one is really starting to get on my nerves. people don’t spend their money and carry huge loads of water bottles if they can have the equivalent for « free » at home. If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough, even in the cases where the original source is of comparable quality.
- kristopolous 7y agoThen put a $50 filter at the tap and you're good for probably $25,000 of bottled water. It's marketing that drives the preference. That's why most chronic bottled water drinkers I know surround their life with other bullshit irrelevant products. It's the same mechanics
- bubblewrap 7y agoFilters seem like a lot of hassle, though. You have to keep them clean and exchange them on a regular basis. I don't really trust that solution.
- fifnir 7y agoSo what's another plastic bottle in the dump right? Someone will figure it out, as long as you don't need to deal with the hassle
- bubblewrap 7y agoIn my country, plastic bottles have returnable deposits, so they tend to not end in the dump. There are also glass bottles available. That said, I think plastic can be OK if it is trashed adequately. I don't think my plastic bottles end up in the oceans.
- fifnir 7y agoEven if it gets recycled, it's not free. Raw materials need to be collected, processed, and transfered. The bottle-quality plastic has to be created and transfeed to the bottle making factory. The bottles transfered again potentially, filled with water, wrapped in more plastic, transfered again.... all that before recycling.
- bubblewrap 7y agoFilters are also not free.
- kristopolous 7y agoSure we aren't at zero yet. But dropping the ecological footprint by 99% is a good first step.
- kristopolous 7y agoMany under-sink filtration systems last at least 10,000 gallons. They take 5 minutes max to replace. Are you saying that 5 minute task every few years is more work then manually lugging 10,000 gallons of water through say, 10,000 separate containers, carrying each one, opening them manually each time, tipping and pouring them, then discarding them? (that's the weight of about 25 cars) Not to be rude but I don't believe you.
- bubblewrap 7y agoThe problem is not the 5 minutes, it is to remember doing it. Because if you don't remember it, you might get sick from bacteria growing in the filter.
- Raidion 7y agoAsk your favorite personal digital assistant to set a reminder and then swap it out using all the time you save not lugging bottled water home from the store.
- bubblewrap 7y agoActually, I simply use unfiltered tap water. As for the reminder - I think in reality, it often isn't done. A reminder isn't a guarantee for it being done. As it stands, I have trouble to descale the washing machine every six months. I know that the simple table based filters (a can with a filter to filter 1 liter of water) are often not exchanged frequently enough. Why introduce that risk unnecessarily?
- vonmoltke 7y ago> Many under-sink filtration systems last at least 10,000 gallons. Every filtration system I have owned needs to have the cartridges replaced every six months. What system has multi-year cartridges?
- zrobotics 7y agoNot multi-year, but my mother has a culligan reverse-osmosis system (their tap water tastes horrible). There are three filters, the first two get replaced yearly, the RO membrane filter lasts 3 years. Tastes indistinguishable from filtered bottled water.
- navigatesol 7y ago>I don't really trust that solution. What other-worldly solution do you think the bottling companies are using?
- bubblewrap 7y agoI think they at least professionally manage the hygiene in their factories. They pay cleaners to clean stuff and exchange filters on a regular schedule.
- xorfish 7y agoHow do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle. $25'000 is more than you need in several lifetimes. But then again, tab water here is excellent and also cool. So I don't see a reason why I should transport bottled water. It is much more convenient and cheaper.
- kristopolous 7y agoThere's not very expensive filtration systems rated for 100,000 gallons. The standard kirkland bottled water you see in the US in the standard 80 unit packs would run you $195,000 for that. Municipal water would be about $1,500 for that + $150 filter. It's a 99.2% cheaper option. Oh right and the 1.6 million water bottles you'd not have produced, right.
- maccard 7y ago> How do you spend $25'000 on bottled water? Where I'm from it costs 16.5 cents per liter. That includes a 2 cent tax for recycling the PET Bottle. Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane. However, my office has 17 people on my floor. If everyone here drank one bottle of it a day, we'd hit it in 2 years.
- vonmoltke 7y ago> Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane. Even given expensive name brand water, a $50 filter cartridge only lasts for six months. That's $3150 for the same period. $50 replacing $25,000 is not grounded in reality.
- acchow 7y agoPlenty of people do it out of laziness or perception of quality.
- cstrat 7y agoFair enough that not all tap water is created equally. I live in Australia (Sydney) and tap water tastes fine to most (obviously a very subjective thing). To be honest, the argument for bottled water (I incorrectly thought) was more due to the convenience factor rather the taste. Clearly there are other points to consider.
- shard972 7y agoThen you don't live in perth where their water is measurably different to east coast water just by it's unusually high alkaline.
- collyw 7y agoThey do. In Scotland the tap water is really good (unlike where I live now). There are still large sections of the supermarket with bottled water.
- gambiting 7y agoPretty much anywhere you go outside of larger cities in Scotland(if you like outdoorsy stuff like I do) has warnings that tap water is supplied directly from the nearest stream/river/lake and is unsafe to drink untreated. I'm perfectly happy to drink tap water nearly anywhere in the UK but any time we go camping in Scotland bottled water is a must because safe tap water is a rarity.
- peterbraden 7y agoThis is nonsense, I grew up in Scotland and travelled widely and I’ve never seen such a notice.
- kawsper 7y agoNot Scotland, but I've travelled a lot in Wales, and most, if not all, of the cottages we have rented have had these notices.
- gambiting 7y agoStayed up in Glencoe literally 2 months ago and these notices were everywhere. Same when we camped next to Loch Ness, Loch Lomond and in Cairngorms.
- jnty 7y agoI've seen the 'private supply' notices but I've never seen them say that water should be treated first (nor have I ever had problems with not.) It's disappointing if they're starting to do this in a blanket fashion.
- arethuza 7y agoI guess it's possible that such places exist that have a private water supply - but in general tap water in Scotland is perfectly safe and tastes lovely. I've certainly never seen a sign anywhere in Scotland that warns about the tap water not being safe.
- scotty79 7y ago> If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough... That's not it. People don't drink tap water because they don't believe it's safe. People who don't drink tap water usually have no trouble drinking it after it's boiled. And non carbonated bottled water tastes just like tap water and you couldn't tell the two apart if there were from taps and brands you are not familiar with.
- lsc 7y agoI am pretty sure that you could tell the difference between a brand of water that is distilled + minerals added and a brand of water that was not distilled in a blind taste test, especially if you drink mostly water. I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example. I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.
- woodpanel 7y ago"if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste" absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.
- lazerwalker 7y agoI recall doing a science project in middle school where I did double-blind taste tests of tap water with a half-dozen brands of bottled water (in a place with decent-tasting tap water, FWIW). IIRC, people showed no statistically significant preference for Evian or other fancy bottled water over the local tap water. That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.
- vidarh 7y agoA few years ago I worked in an office where people had kept refilling filter jugs for years, and I just started using the tap because the filter was too slow and annoying. Took a few weeks and everyone had stopped using the filter - all it took was seeing someone else drink water from the tap, and gradually people would do the same I did and drink from the tap when the jug was empty and realize it tasted perfectly fine. Probably better than the filter, frankly - I don't want to think about how rarely that filter was replaced and the jug washed. Point being that while some places do have awful tap water, a lot of people just drink bottled or filtered water because they see people drink bottled or filtered water and copy that without even stopping to consider if their tap water is good enough or not.
- Veen 7y agoIt is just as good as tap water when it is tap water. https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-2537510642.html https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-253751064...
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoMy chemistry teacher reports that she has issues when she drinks the city water because something something surgically-removed kidney stones. You might also have to modify the chemical makeup of the tap water itself. Personally, I drink tap, but that's mostly because someone won't hook up the fridge (and nobody else in the family likes ice, for some reason.)
- rjf72 7y agoTo take things from a different perspective, I find people judging what others ought consider acceptable to be inexplicable. I find people buying $200 sneakers that offer no significant performance improvement over much cheaper alternatives to be 'inexplicable.' I find people buying $1000 phones when a $200 phone would perform literally 100% of a purchaser's tasks to 100% acceptability, to be 'inexplicable'. I even find people buying new cars 'inexplicable' given their hyper-depreciation - meaning a lightly used car is generally a vastly better value. Of course I put 'inexplicable' in single quotes because these things are all completely explicable. Personal choice is a right of every person in a free society, and people have different views and values. And my examples understate the relevance of this as this choice is far more significant, and frequently personal, when it comes to what people consume than whatever stuff people buy for image crafting.
- hyperbovine 7y agoI’m with you all the way, so long as externalities are priced in.
- jnty 7y agoThis is getting closer to a solution but it assumes that damage is totally reversible given money. If you punch me and break my nose, I can sue you for 'damages' (loss of earnings, medical expenses etc) and in the eyes of civil law everything is OK - but really it would be much better if it hadn't happened in the first place! We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions.
- hyperbovine 7y ago> We recognise that by placing a blanket criminal ban on assault, and in the future I think we're going to have to accept that a lot more for negative-externality actions. But we don't. Rather, we make the price of engaging in that activity extremely high. What would be closest to what you are advocating would be something like summary execution for all cases of homicide and rape, and no civilized country does that.
- chronogram 7y agoTap water here in the Netherlands is excellent, and I’d much prefer it over bottled water, but that’s only available in places where you’d take your jacket off: home, friends, work, school, hairdresser and the likes. If you’re going somewhere you can bring water or buy water in bottles, but I’ve never seen other ways of getting water.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThat's one thing that's changed since my childhood. As a kid, here in the UK, most schools, public buildings and towns (in the street) had drinking fountains. Most town centres, shopping areas, tourist spots etc had them. Quite often they had a way to fill a bottle too. In the eighties they died out, and you'll rarely to never see one today. Why? They certainly weren't unsafe. Bottled water producers seem to have managed to put people off our overwhelmingly safe tap water and drinking fountains. Now tap is seen as second rate somehow. Put in a vending machine instead, etc. Drinking fountains in schools and streets are long gone. So now everyone can buy a Coke or bottled water, complete with single use plastic, and we mistakenly call that progress. The same people seem fine using tap water for tea, ice, juice etc. Yet another bit of progress that baffles me. :)
- iamphilrae 7y agoI remember mentioning this in a comment thread on Instagram. One response came from someone in the UK who said something along the lines of... “It has been scientifically proven that our water contains high concentrations of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. That’s why I will only drink bottled water.” facepalm I remember in the 80’s when travelling to Europe, whether you could drink the tap water was always a question to ask at the start of the holiday. 30 years later, we are now questioning our own tap water even though the rest of the EU and America have caught up, with water quality that is on par with anything that could be purchased in a bottle.
- mrguyorama 7y agoHere in a small American city, fountains are seemingly coming back into vogue
- petre 7y agoWe have a filter. Although tap water is clean it retains chlorine and pipe scaling impurities. Bottled water was found to contain microplastics.