While I wish that every day was actually Pancake Day, or Take Your Flask To Work Day, World Water Day is just as important. There is a great video by Annie Leonard who talks about why bottled water is evil and how if you are pregnant, it is even worse than smoking. It is 7 minutes long, but it is really, really good.
Great video! It's always a good thing when you can save money AND help the environment. We stopped using water bottles at work & switched to a giant pitcher that is kept in the fridge.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the PSA.
Okay, I totally agree with what she is saying, especially as a vegatarian I am hiper aware of how eating locally grown things helps our planet through less emmition use and tearing down rain forest to make room for the high demand of low cost beef etc.
ReplyDeleteHowever I will admit I am a bottle water drinker. I drink Trader Joe's (a healthy supermarket in the West Coast) water that has electrolytes added to the water. While I agree with her that normal wter is better used from the tap I just dont know any other way to drink water with electrolytes then to buy it in a bottle of water that has had it added to.
I feel bad but I recycle the bottle and thats really all I can do.
Maybe what they need to do is have cities try to add all the electroltes to the cities water supply so that those of us who buy water for that purpose wont have to buy plastic bottles any longer.
I really did like this video btw, I just recommended watching it to a few of my consumer crazed friends lol
ReplyDeleteInteresting video. I disagree with the taste test thing. But I do agree we need to be more responsible with the environment. Now that I work from home, I can just as easily fill my water bottle with filtered water from my fridge. However, I live in the desert. And sometimes when you're out and about, you gotta rehydrate and nothing does it better than a big, cool bottle of water. :-d
ReplyDeleteI live in Austin and the tap water is pretty tasty except twice a year when the lakes turn over and it gets kind of a grassy smell. But originally I'm from West Texas where a lot of the tap water tastes like something died in it. But then West Texans just drink beer anyway.
ReplyDelete@Jasmine - me, too! It takes some 4,000 liters of water to produce one steak, while it only takes 1,100 liters to grow a vegetarian enough food for a whole day.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, worse than smoking for pregnant women? I don't think so...
ReplyDeleteif you appeal to the money conscious crowd more so than those who care about the ecosystem maybe this will work, i just dont know anyone who cares about the earth more than they do their wallets
ReplyDeleteSorry but my tap water tastes terrible (I gag when I brush my teeth), so I do drink bottled water, but I recycle them. At work we have the water guy deliver the big bottles and what I do is re-fill my little bottles to carry around with me. We do the same thing at home.
ReplyDeleteI do use an aluminum bottle for my water, but I also have to admit that I love, and often buy, Vitamin Water.
ReplyDeletethe problem with using your plastic bottles over and over again is that there is something about the plastic leaking into the water that is not healthy for you (obvisouly) . I dont think every bottle does this but those that do, and there are many, can give you cancer, at least that is what I have heard. Thats one of the reasons why aluminum bottles are such a great alterntive and all the rage right now.
ReplyDelete@rocketqueen, did you ever see the Family Guy episode where they were listening to 'sounds of the rain forest' to fall asleep and at first you hear birds and then you hear chainsaws and men yelling at each other to move the trees back so they could move in the cheap cows, laughing and saying fuck you to Al GOre the whole time? HAha, it was funny but so true and tragic
So many ppl think vegatarians dont eat meat cause of not wanting to harm animals but it goes so far beyond that. One vegatarian in 1 yr saves dozens of feet of rain forest alone... we can make a difference one person at a time
I'll be all over tap water when they stop adding fluoride and chlorine...or give me the ability to remove it.
ReplyDeleteI am all for conservation (a word we used when I started doing it) but the minute some person starts telling me that water is bad for pregnant women..worse than smoking in fact they lose credibility with me. She needs to shut her organic pie hole on that one if she wants to get her message across. This is an issue where one needs to persuade, not scare and do not think I haven't noticed that nothing is said about plastic cola bottles and liquor bottles apparently they are not giving pregnant women cancer or causing problems with our landfill space. If you want to see something really scary watch a factory farm video sometime.
ReplyDeleteoh, and I don't need your advice on how I choose to spend my money tyvm!
ReplyDeleteNo offense but that's good only if your town drinking water is OK. I've talked to my water company and I was told there were
ReplyDelete" acceptable levels of some contaminants in the water".
When I asked what they considered acceptable because to me NO lead, CBC's etc... would be acceptable they brushed me off. Oh and they filter this lovely water DOWNSTREAM from the old area dump (now a land fill). YUMMY hunh?
She said that drinking bottled water is on it's way to being as cool as smoking while pregnant. She DIDN'T say bottled water is more dangerous for pregnant women... that is a misinterpretation.
ReplyDeleteWay late here, but...
ReplyDeleteI hardly ever eat beef but am otherwise a full-on omnivore.
If the dang laws in most American cities/counties/subdivisions would allow us to raise goats and chickens, we'd never need beef!
I eat so much deer meat and self-caught seafood year-round anyway that I don't even like beef anymore--too greasy.
I'd raise chickens in a heartbeat if I could. We have also mulled the idea of raising rabbits which we could easily hide from the prying eyes of the county, unlike the chickens and goats...
Oh, and living right on the ocean our drinking water is produced by reverse osmosis and has so many chemicals in it, it will gag you. We might as well just drink the damn salt water.
ReplyDelete"Acceptable levels" is a word highly used in our town drinking water reports, too, and it's scary.
We have a service bring the giant 5-gal things for the house, and I reuse whatever containers I would recycle anyway, like juice bottles, etc. instead of buying individual waters.
We all should just do whatever we can for ourselves and the environment.
Huh, I'm originally from Cleveland, and my parents are amazed that I think their tap water tastes fine. In Phoenix it tastes terrible because the water comes in from open canals and it has a very hard taste from all the dissolved minerals. Filters are a good solution though.
ReplyDeleteI have been planning on switching my Nalgene for a stainless bottle for awhile. Perhaps I'll do it now.