I'll be the first and put my hand up...yes I have bought bottled water. On 60 Minutes recently there was a story called "Liquid Gold"
Australians spent more than $500,000,000 on bottled water in 2008. I don't really care so much where people spend their money but the biggest issue for me is the energy going into getting that bottle of water into your shopping bag.....
....."for every product you make you need some oil, don't you. But how much oil is the question....that much oil (about 1 cup) to put that much water (1.25litres) in the same bottle. Jon Dee says the simple solution to such a wanton waste of energy is to take tap water back to the people. He champions the return of the old-fashioned bubbler delivering tap water - filtered and free."
So that's about 1 cup of oil (250ml) for every 1.25 litres of bottled water - approximately. There was 600 million litres of bottled water sold last year - this equates to about 120 millions litres of oil! Of course this is oil being processed, burnt or otherwise transformed into by-products and pollution.
A quote from the 60 minutes segment: "At the end of the day it's all marketing, it's all PR it's all spin and its aim is to extract money out of your pocket and to basically maximise profits out of your gullibility and that's one thing Australians need to look at".
Then there's the mammoth issue of all these empty bottles ending up in land fill or in our water ways. Here's some ideas on how to reduce waste.
