Really Just Drink Tap Water !
Of course as long as it’s safe, there have been thousands of tests and the vast majority of us cannot tell tap water from bottled water. There’s certainly no health benefits and if you live in somewhere like the UK, USA or Europe then there’s no reason not to drink it all the time. The reason I’m having this slight rant is that I was in a meeting yesterday in London, in the cabinet in the meeting room next to the coffee machine were bottles of mineral water. Do you know where this water was from – Fiji, someone had had bottled water in Fiji and shipped it over to London to be drunk in a London meeting. It tasted exactly the same as tap water – what an incredible waste of resources.
It reminded me of the Only fools and Horses show some time ago, when they created their own water called “Peckham Spring Water” which they actually filled from a tap in their flat.
They sold thousands to health food shops and supermarkets at a huge profit.
Of course this parody is rather close to the truth, could you tell the difference. I suspect I could not and even if I could is it really worth the huge waste of resources to transport water from Fiji all the way to the UK. The environmental cost must be enormous for a at best negligible benefit.
So if you live in country where the tap water is fine, why not give up buying bottled water. Save those big plastic bottles, fill them up from the tap and put them in the fridge. Fill up all your smaller bottles and take them to work, then refill at the end of the day.
If you don’t think it would make a difference – think on this, 32,200 tonnes of CO2 is produced in the UK every year simply by transporting this bottled water. That’s not including the manufacturing of the bottles, extraction and advertising etc. Talking of bottles, these also have to be dealt with – in the UK again 50% of our plastic bottles go to be recycled in places like China. All this pointless manufacturing, transportation for a product we have in abundance in our very homes.
So please think about wiping bottled water from your lives, you just have to be a little organised and you can have cold bottled tap water from your fridge. You’ll save a fortune and reduce a huge and utterly pointless environmental cost.
