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Once upon time, not so very long ago, carrying a water bottle around with you was a sign of good health and - by extension, because healthy people are usually assumed to be environmentally sensitive - green consciousness. It showed that you valued water! It showed that you valued water enough to pay for it instead of just drawing it from your tap! It showed that you were the sort of person who needed to have water at her side at all times!
Now, of course, it just shows that you're way behind the times, or, at least, terribly misinformed about water and plastic.
Studies have shown for years, of course, that tap water in most communities is just as clean (and in some cases, cleaner) as bottled water. Some bottled water is, in fact, just filtered tap water, which means, basically, that if you installed a store-bought filter onto your kitchen tap and filled old Dasani bottles with it you would be drinking nothing different. And, of course, you'd stop accumulating all those plastic bottles, which you've been recycling all these years, no doubt, but still - why should we be using all that energy to reccyle something that we didn't need in the first place?
Which is the whole point of this month's Big Green Idea - drink water differently. Drink water without using all those little plastic bottles. Drink water from your tap.
The easiest way to make this change in your household - assuming, of course, that you're not doing it already - is so simple that it sounds almost condescending: turn on your tap, fill up a glass, and drink. That's all. Just drink the water that comes out of your tap. It's just as good as anything that comes in a bottle. But let's say, for the sake of argument - and it's an argument that my husband has made, many a time - that you don't like the taste of tap water. Let's say that you think you can taste the purifying chemicals in tap water, or perhaps you're just suspicious of tap water, because, hey, who knows what's in it, and isn't it true that there's always some water being messed up somewhere and what if that water finds its way into your pipes?
Okay, fine - so you don't like tap water. Stick a filter on your tap. You can buy them at your local hardware store, and they're easy to instal onto your tap and once it's there, you can forget about it until it needs replacing and just drink drink drink all the filtered water that your tummy can handle.
Don't feel up to installing your own filter? Get yourself a Brita - one of those container filters that you just fill with water and filters that water as you pour it out. Be aware, though, that Brita filters themselves are not currently recyclable - you have to sent it back to Brita in Europe (!), or else it just ends up in landfill, in which case the environment is probably better off if you just use bottled water and recycle the bottles. (Note - as of January 5, you can recycle
old Brita filters by dropping them off at participating Whole Foods locations. You can thank Beth of FakePlasticFish and her Take Back The Filter campaign for that!)
Here's the thing - you just want to cut down on your use of plastics, and water is one of the most needlessly plasticked of all the plasticked things in this world. So just reduce if you have to - buy smaller quantities of bigger bottles, instal a filter, get a Brita and resolve to take the used filter to Whole Foods for recycling.
Or, you know - just turn on the tap and be grateful that we live in a society where we have the luxury of turning our noses up at clean water. And then turn your own nose down, and drink.
Catherine Connors blogs at Her Bad Mother, where she's trying to score good karma by giving away donations to charity and iTunes gift cards.
