Water - WATER! - You can Brush your Teeth with it

(Kudos to the Rado Aahs classic about water…which is only mostly true. In the U.S. you can brush your teeth with water. In India, you just have to make sure that you don’t swallow after you rinse J)

We’ve all seen the commercial that shows a plastic bottle of water, vibrating slightly, for an “I’m beginning to get bored” amount of time. Around the time when we start to wonder who would pay the money for such a dull advertisement, the voice tells us, “30 seconds on a treadmill. Forever in a landfill.”

Huh. Clever, I’ve always thought. And indeed, it’s also catchy – many, many times, that mantra has chanted through my head and encouraged me to carry my empty plastic water bottle until I find a recycling bin or the bring my metal water bottle with me to functions such as graduation parties and open houses, making a choice to refill and reuse it instead of creating more waste. (Plus, refilling and reusing disposable plastic water bottles can give you diseases…)

But…why do we spend money on bottles of water in the first place? Why not fill up a pitcher and get out a few glasses? Why not fill up our own water bottle before leaving the house instead of grabbing a plastic bottle from the fridge? Are we really that lazy? Maybe it’s because our water isn’t clean. Ahem. HELLOOO people. We live in the United States. We have filtered water systems. And if our water really isn’t clean (indeed, my stomach has been the victim of impure water sources in this “developed country” that we live in)…we have the luxury of purchasing water-filtering tools ourselves. In fact, did you know that some bottled waters are actually filled using tap water, not the mountain spring water that we assume? Yup, that’s fact, not legend. But still we spend $2.25 on a plastic bottle of…tap water?

So much of the world doesn’t have clean water… I am living there right now. So much of the world suffers because of the waste that comes from our consumption of bottled water…I am living there right now. And eventually…we might suffer from that waste too.

(What got me thinking about water again today was watching a short film called “The Story of Bottled Water”. I think you can find it online…I encourage you to watch it and to do your own research on the truth about water around the world!)