Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

The NSW Gov­ern­ment has just decided to ban bot­tled water.

Well, for Gov­ern­ment departments.

They’ve done so after a coun­try town in south­ern NSW intro­duced a blan­ket ban. This seems dumb.

Peo­ple buy water for con­ve­nience sake. Water is impor­tant to live. The town in NSW will intro­duce fil­tered water foun­tains into the street.

I can’t help but think that this is an ail­ing Premier’s cyn­i­cal attempt to ride a wave cre­ated by a small cor­ner of his constituency…

We’re ask­ing gov­ern­ment depart­ments to phase it out unless there is obvi­ous and prac­ti­cal com­mon­sense rea­sons not to in the event some­one doesn’t have cool water in a hot envi­ron­ment,” he [Pre­mier Rees] said.

The Pre­mier says the move will save tax­payer money and help reduce the impact on the envi­ron­ment of pro­duc­ing and throw­ing away plas­tic bottles.

Local busi­nesses in the town of 2,500 peo­ple are propos­ing to replace the bot­tles with reusables and then offer direc­tions to fil­tered water foun­tains that will be installed on the main street.”

At the very least, if they don’t ban it, then at least they will reduce their usage of it and in doing so, reduce the half-a-billion dol­lars a year that Aus­tralians are spend­ing on bot­tled water.”

That’s half-a-billion dol­lars worth of con­ve­nience and jobs axed for ide­o­log­i­cal reasons.

Bot­tled water, in some people’s minds, is a tax on stu­pid­ity. Ever held a bot­tle of Evian up to a mir­ror? It’s free from the taps.

But that’s not the point.

As friend Paul pointed out in an email dis­cussing the coun­try town’s ban — peo­ple are buy­ing the bot­tle not the water — you’re hardly going to stick your mouth on a tap in a pub­lic place.

Benny is most unhappy. Tap water gives him ulcers. He’s the only per­son I know who sees flu­o­ride as an elec­tion issue.

Stu­pid hippies.

  1. 1
    Amy

    There is a point to be made about the chem­i­cals that leech out of those bot­tles into your water when you refill them though.


  2. 2
    Nathan

    Except that snopes says most of these the­o­ries are old wives tales…


  3. 3
    Nathan

    It’s actu­ally the reusable bot­tles that are dan­ger­ous — not reusing sin­gle use bottles…


  4. 4
    Nathan

    The ABC has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on Amy’s point.

    And the jury may still be slightly out — but at this stage the health impli­ca­tions seem unlikely.


  5. 5
    queenstuss

    What’s the dif­fer­ence between water in the first time or sub­se­quent times, and what’s the dif­fer­ence between reusable bot­tles and sin­gle use bottles?

    It’s a topic I’d like to see more research on.


  6. 6
    Scott

    Firstly, I guess I fit nicely into the ‘Just shut up and drink it’ category.

    And sec­ondly, I thought that if a single-use bot­tle is re-used, it defies its own exis­tence and sim­ply can­not exist.

    There­fore, is this really a topic worth dis­cussing at all? Or are there sim­ply a whole bunch of delu­sional nitwits going around think­ing they’re drink­ing bot­tled water.


  7. 7
    Amy

    From my read­ing Snopes said yes it degrades and no links to cancer/death/mayhem have not been proven. But I tend to trust the chemist in my life on this one, and he thinks it prob­a­bly isn’t good for you.


  8. 8
    Amy

    Aside from any­thing else, water picks up a bad taste in plas­tic bottles.

    But every­thing around us is killing slow­ing one way or another, even oxygen.


  9. 9
    Amy

    Wow, can you tell I am not awake yet?
    …every­thing around us is slowly killing us, one way or another…


  10. 10
    Amy

    But the point is, if for exam­ple your fam­ily has a his­tory of estrogen-caused breast can­cer (as mine does), it prob­a­bly isn’t worth the risk of drink­ing from some­thing which research has shown has the poten­tial to leach estrogen-like com­pounds, espe­cially when there are read­ily avail­able alternatives.


  11. 11
    Nathan

    Scott’s the phar­ma­cist in my life. I will go with his opin­ion on the matter.


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