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Originally Posted by moz
Wow, it must suck to live somewhere that it's not safe to drink the tap water. In Sydney a few years ago we had cryptosporidium in the main water supply so many people had to boil drinking water to be on the safe side. That was really ugly, but luckily only for a couple of weeks.
But buying water in bottles... is pretty much the defining symptom of a society focused on creating waste. Sure, a few people here reuse their bottles, or like me never buy them in the first place but reuse other people's bottles. But the whole bottled water industry is about taking a system that works efficiently (piped water costing ~$US0.30/kilolitre retail) and replacing it with an incredibly wasteful one that's more profitable. Wrap water in plastic, truck it long distances, sell it in shops, throw away the plastic. Result: someone pays $1 for $0.0002 of water. Result: huge amounts of petrochemicals used to make the bottle, run the plant, run the trucks, run the shops, run the garbage trucks and run the landfill where the bottle ends up. But GDP goes up, all bow before our magnificent GDP!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CleverClothe
This is exactly the point that came up in my mind. Bottled water is a huge waste and is not needed 95% off the time. You can get clean water cheaply just about anywhere you can go. And if you can't get it, bring a canteen that you reuse (metal or plastic).
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Gimme back my sturdy bottles! I squished another one this morning, as usual. Then it sits lopsided on my desk and threatens to topple over.
Re-using the bottles is a bad idea. Bacteria grows in the dampness. And as the plastic breaks down over a few uses, it releases carcinogens.
Bham has really good yummy water, but not where I work. For over a year, our drinking fountains were closed due to contamination. Then, they turned them back on again. No one trusts the fountains anymore. I won't drink from them, prefer to take my chances with the cancer-causing plastic!
Back on topic, I can absolutely affirm that going ebook has been better for the environment in my case. I was hard on pbooks, they seldom were fit to share after I finished slashing them into small manageable sections. (Whole books were heavy and hurt my hands) So they went to the burn pile and got turned into smoke and ashes. (No local recycling in my unincorporated neighborhood) Nowadays, the worst that happens to my books is deletion. Although I did have my first EBW1150 get hot and burn itself out, but it never actually caught fire, so no smoke.