I probably average less than a bottle a day as I also drink lots of Coke, iced tea, lemonade, and juices. So probably less than 17¢ per day even if I never got it on sale, or less than $60 a year.
Because the bottle itself is an excellent drinking container, somehow much more satisfying than drinking out of a glass.
Since the use of plastic packaging is inevitable, ISTM that effective solutions to these problems must include more effective recycling. I also don’t know that it’s necessarily fair to assume that recycling operations are as bad everywhere as you’ve described. I know it’s pretty bad in many countries and in some parts of the US, to the point that some US jurisdictions have abandoned recycling altogether, but around here, although I can’t attest to how effective the system truly is, it does seem to be taken seriously. The municipality recently supplied households with exceptionally large wheeled recycling bins and no longer requires sorting different materials into different bins, and from what I can see on my street, everyone uses them.
I suspect that our taste buds care more about what we were used to drinking growing up, or even what we’ve become used to drinking recently, than what we evolved to drink.
The taste of tap water can vary quite a bit from one municipality to another. In many areas, it does taste as good or better than bottled water, but in others, it’s noticeably worse.
Reusable water bottles are incredibly common, I actually use one in the house as I prefer carrying it around compared to a glass. My son brings one to and from school every day (two in the warmer months). I see people using them on work calls all the time (most of us WFH). It’s not difficult to do.
We have a regular filter in-line with our kitchen sink cold water, and there’s another in our fridge. I like the taste of our tap water.
A lot of bottled water is tap water coming out of a municipal treatment plant, some but not all of which has been processed further.
And some spring water tastes terrible. Some spring water is bad for you. Some spring water is actually poisonous. Depends on the spring.
You may have an actual spring of excellent water nearby, and be able to get bottled water that’s from that spring. But most people aren’t buying locally-bottled spring water. Even if they’re buying something labeled as “spring water”, it’s often shipped very long distances.
I’m pretty sure you can get five gallon containers. Even less plastic per drink.
Your joy in drinking from a bottle instead of a glass or cup is an idiosyncratic reaction, I think. If I notice any difference at all, it’s a bad taste from the plastic; though whether I get that seems to depend on the particular bottle. Maybe I taste breakdown products that most people don’t and some bottles have more than others.
But in any case there are reusable bottles. Even the ones you’re using are reusable, though as they break down fast it’s unwise to use any of them for long.
When I attend meetings, I do my best to remember to bring a coffee cup. The coffee’s usually served in cheap plastic and I can really taste the plastic in those things; it’s awful.
And I usually avoid the bottled water they’re handing out and go refill that cup from a fountain or tap somewhere; in part because that bottled water usually tastes even worse to me.
Not just “a spring”, but many of them, all relatively local up in the northern wilderness. In terms of taste and quality, the water is tested and analyzed, the location of the spring and the water’s mineral content is on the label.
At any rate, I’m describing what works for me in my present situation. It would change the equation considerably, as well as probably the cost, if the water had to be shipped long distances. In that event I’d probably get a good built-in filtration system instead.
Which would weight over 42 pounds. I already have a hernia and I’m not getting any younger!
Let me add, as the OP of this thread, that it was intended as a cautionary note about how plastic containers can leach into the liquid they hold over long periods of time. It was not intended to be yet another interminable debate about bottled water vs tap water or the evils of plastic.
But in terms of recycling, I’ll say that I share the environmental concerns expressed here but as always, those concerns have to balanced against reasonable needs and preferences. The municipality here seems strongly committed to promoting and facilitating recycling, so I can only hope that their actual practice lives up to the ideals they’re promoting. I’ve read their do’s and don’ts related to what can be recycled and I carefully abide by the rules. I can’t do any more than that to ensure responsible recycling.
That the “use of plastic packaging [and other single use applications] is inevitable” should not be assumed; while there are certain things that plastics are particularly useful or nearly irreplaceable, such as melt-blown polypropylene filters and the multitude of single-use medical devices, there is a vast amount of wholly unnecessary plastic packaging and dunnage that ends up as landfill waste (at best) or detritus that liters the landscape and becomes a hazard to wildlife.
And just to make this completely clear, there is no “more effective recycling” of most plastics, something that is well understood by polymer science engineers and is not amenable to hypothetical advances in recycling technology. Even PET and HDPE plastics (the “Resin Identification Code” 1 and 2 plastics that recyclers will accept) can at most be “recycled” once or twice into inferior quality plastic before being discarded, and this is even assuming that it makes it to a recycling plant and isn’t rejected for being too contaminated to process. All of the other RIC polymers (LDPE, PVC, polypropylene, polystyrene, and all of the textiles, surface coatings, et cetera) are not cost effective and often not even possible to recover for recycling.
The PET water bottles that you may dutifully place in a recycling bin are almost certainly going into a landfill, or shredded (producing microplastic fragments that will inevitably make it out into the environment), or will be burned to produce a paltry amount of energy for the amount of carbon dioxide produced. For some plastics such as PVC, the byproducts of combustion are so toxic that the only real option for disposal is to landfill them, again hopefully in a reservoir with an impermeable bottom.
Under what kind of conditions were they stored? Does your attic get very hot, or cold?
Me, I “recycle” any plastic jugs by taking them to a local shop that sells birdseed and other similar supplies. I even have a neighbor who has two toddlers, and they drop off their juice and milk jugs at my place when they found out what I was doing.
So go to your average gravel pit. Look for a medium colored, brownish gray rock that’s fractured, splintery and powdery. Pick that up. Put it in your mouth and suck on that for about 30 minutes. That’s Santa Barbara water.
When I was a child in San Diego, our tap water was so bad that we had bottled water—delivered, in large glass bottles which we kept in the fridge. That was wonderful. They switched to plastic bottles sometime in the 1980s and that was less good.
Is there any reason why water could not be sold in resuable, recyclable glass? I imagine the preference for plastic is more about weight and breakage and cost of collecting empties than taste or cost of production.
