Knocking the Competition - Bottled Water is Super Bad for the Environment

I don't believe in knocking the competition. I believe that it is much better to point out the strengths of your own product or service, and to sometimes even praise the competition for what they do well. Sometimes there are exceptions to this rule. I think this is one of them.

The US and now the rest of the world are going crazy over bottled water. Clearly there may be slight advantages in convenience and taste when compared to straight tap water, but it is hard to see much advantage at all when compared to filtered or RO (reverse osmosis) water.

The price we are paying for any slight benefit is way more than the high cost we pay for the water itself. My wife tells me that she can get the 16 ounce bottles for $4 per tray of 30 bottles. That would be about $1 per gallon. Of course, when we buy it one bottle at a time a 7/11 or a trade show, the cost might be $10 a gallon.

A fellow blogger, Michael Williams pointed me to this article.

That has translated into massive costs in packaging the water, usually in plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which is derived from crude oil, and then transporting it by boat, train or on land.

"Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 US cars for a year," according to the study. "Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year."

Once the water is consumed, disposing the plastic bottles poses an environmental risk.

The study, citing the Container Recycling Institute, said that 86 percent of plastic water bottles in the United States end up as garbage and those buried can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

I would think that it would be obvious that we to the extent that we are worried about the water in our tap, or don't like the taste, it would make way more sense to filter it, or get home delivery, and then put the water into California Springs water bottles for ease of transport to the office, games, picnics, etc. Our bottles will generally be useful for up to five years. Hmmmm. Seems like an easy decision.

So, for those of you who care about the shortage of oil or the size of our landfill problems, start stearing your clients away from disposable bottles to reusable bottles.