Bottled Water: The Water is Fine, but What About The Plastic Bottle?

"You pay more for your water than you do for your gasoline."
-  anonymous bottled water dissenter

You should hear my dad and his brothers - who went to college in the late 1960s - laugh on and on about bottled water. Examples:

"Who the hell would have thought we'd be paying good money to drink water?"

"I've never heard of such a stupid thing as bottled water."

"Water out of the damned tap is free."

I just went to a baseball game downtown with them.  We passed the streetside vendors selling their near-frozen one-liter bottles of water dripping with condensation.  They looked tasty and I could just about feel the water on the back of my throat.  I resisted.  "Buy 'em from me, dey onlay two for tree!" They'd holler.

But price wasn't my personal objection to bottled water.  Not a price paid out of my wallet, anyway.  A different kind of price. The video says most of it.

See, and then it's like this: I rode the Valley Metro Light Rail home, and stood among the ASU college students heading back to their dorms.  Two right next to me were drinking Pepsi from a can.  Then, when the first guy finished his drink, I watched him look at the can, do a quick scan for a place to put it, then he set it on the floor and kicked it under the seat as though it would just vanish from existence. And their conversation? That too. They were complaining about dropped calls on their AT&T serviced iPhones. The whole package got to me - not in the form of outrage, but in questions.

Honest questions now . . . has it come to this?  Is convenience our only compass? Are the only standards for how we make our decisions 1). ease and 2). how such things make us feel?  It's dangerously close to that, I fear. If only discarding plastic was as easy as kicking it under a train seat.

I can't verify these numbers, but they say that using your own refillable water bottle prevents 167 disposable bottles from the environment. That's worthwhile, I think.