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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Education, along with a tax on bottled water would go a long way.
(however) i warn yuz, folks get weird around their water supplies. i know some that would characterize drinking local tap water as akin to taking poison (and possibly sapping one's precious bodily fluids); and then there's Portland...
i say, provide it only for people with foreign passports.
Of course, you can buy water filters, too, but bottled stuff is what people are gonna do if they don't have the cash up-front for the filters.
I'd rather see people drink bottled water than Pepsi, and rather see people drink their water from their own reusable bottles, but banning water as an option at the retail level isn't a good idea either. Institutionally it's fine if a campus or business wants to ban bottled water at their own facilities, but I don't think it's beneficial to remove it from retail.
Educate people that bottled water is tap water and the bottles are an environmental nightmare. We should also educate them that sugary drinks will make them fat too.
We should be going the Oregon route and have a refundable deposit on all bottles & cans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se12y9hSO…
(That would discourage the proliferation of the 1 lifer soda bottle as well.)
You were warned not to drink the water from Johnson Hall on UW campus because of the building's pluming. After the remodel in 2005 or so, they had new water fountains with those water bottle spigots. They're neat!
Well guess what? Those who don't own cars, who have to walk 6-20 blocks to carry groceries home, the plastic bag ban was a major inconvenience, so please please please, learn to stfu when they place a ban on plastic bottles.
Another way to save the environment, that I personally wont have a problem with, but will enrage many of you, is a ban on computers that cant be upgraded. Cant swap out the CPU, Memory or Hard Drive? Banned!! Why? Because it forces people to buy new computers when there's a minor problem that could be solved with a simple repair, but a repair that's no longer possible due to brilliant idea of actually gluing the components to each other. Since ive never owned a name brand computer and have been assembling them with open components, its really easy for me to accept this type of ban, just as it was easy for people who were used to using cloth bags to accept the plastic bag ban, just as it will be easy for people who use their own BPA Free plastic bottles should a plastic bottle ban take effect. Banning computers that cant be upgraded will indeed save landfills from tons of toxic materials that people simply don't recycle.
Instead of sugary sports drinks, I drink Pellegrino sparkling water. It is full of calcium and magnesium but no sugar (or salt).
Would I be taxed for drinking Pellegrino or Perrier because it's water and it's in a bottle? Seems stupid.
Maybe if some of you do-gooders, liberals and muck rakers wanted to help solve a real problem, you'd figure out why the corrupt politicians in Olympia do nothing about it.
Oh, sorry...I forgot...they pay for this blog!
I cannot remember which small nation I was in, but they had very heavy-duty plastic bottles for most beverages, with a steep deposit. the bottles were washed and reused, much like the old glass bottles. Seemed pretty ingenious as a middle road, and avoiding the handling issues and weight of glass in transport.
So I can ride my bike with a glass bottle in the holder?
Or have a whole CYO camp full of elementary school kids carrying around glass.
Smart. Real smart.
Not always...here's The Difference:
http://www.crystalgeyserasw.com/differen…
I took a holiday in Cambodia last year, and when I was on the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Pehm both sides of the road were covered with 2 things: plastic water bottles and plastic bags. Some houses had piles that were 10 feet tall and took up hundreds of sqft. Shit was EVERYWHERE and disgusting to see. The cost of this crap getting into the environment is much worse than the hit to the margins of bottled water producers for coming up with a better way to deliver their products.
Also, I completely agree with your ban on "disposable" computers. It's stupid and wasteful to throw away the entire device because you want more storage, or a faster processor, and the only benefit to buying a whole new machine is more money for the people selling them. Bah.
@20: Italy started installing mineral water fountains in public to get people to stop buying Pellegrino, etc. Fancy or not, waste is waste.
If you keep them but put a hefty deposit on them -- a quarter or even a dollar, none of this nickel garbage -- that would be OK.
Tap water is great. Bailo, as usual, doesn't understand even the basics of what he's talking about; Kent's municipal water also comes, in part, from springs. Or wells, which are the same thing, just deeper.
While I'm loath to give Coca-Cola much credit for anything, the way they handle bottle deposits in the third world is really impressive. You rarely see people throwing a glass Fanta or Coke bottle in the garbage, and, if they do, someone's going to retrieve it to get the deposit. Those glass bottles rarely wind up as permanent garbage (unless/until they break, I guess). The downside (from the perspective of the company) is that third worlders don't drink soda as just a regular beverage the way they do. It's more of a treat that you go out of your way to get, not something you bring home in multiple one-liter bottles.
And I would guess that the plastic bottle waste in Cambodia is more a result of a lack of potable drinking water. I doubt Cambodians like wasting their income on bottled water.
That's odd. Huge swaths of my family live within 5 miles of you, and we all think the water is great.
Still, if you're framing this as "ban bottled water and give me a skin condition", I don't know many people on SLOG who'd vote "no".
Yes, the plastic bag ban was pointless, seeing as how plastic bags are better for the environment than any of the substitutes. Same goes for plastic bottles. Or did you forget how much a glass bottle weighs, or what it takes to manufacture an aluminum can?
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-Ne…
Paris did it too: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/world/…
Notice the alibaba links. Nigerian businessmen are well accustomed to doing business with China; a hundred thousand Nigerians live in Guangzhou just for international trade. This is just another example of how the US is increasingly becoming irrelevant to global commerce and development. I noticed the other day that the newest class of container ships will bypass the US entirely -- we have no ports capable of taking them. Asia and Europe do, and Africa is likely to be able to fairly soon. The only things Americans ever ship to Africa are used clothing and bags of subsidized food.
What do you think Noicons @37? Just wondering.
Knowing you live down there just makes me all the less inclined to want to do anything about your shitty, acrochordon-making water...
http://youtu.be/R11x32WoxrM
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to have bottled water in your home, at work, or in a restaurant. A glass with tap water (filtered if things are really that bad in your area, but I've drunk tap water in communities large and small across the country and can count on one hand the number of times the tap water has been even mildly unpleasant) is perfectly fine.
Ah, right wingers, always eager to cry hypocrisy while they do nothing.
You can feel free to eat shit, however.
Yes, I carry a steel water bottle, but I also need to refill it during many days. I am fine with a ban on small plastic bottles but the gallon jugs still should be available.
A ban without foresight to issues like these is very myopic activism.
The article specifically mentions landfills. Carbon footprint is a concern but, frankly, with 9 billion people on the horizon and no signs of that letting up a ban on plastic water bottles isn't going to make much of a difference.
Your life must be very fulfilling for an illiterate.
He gives his scraps to hobos! Just like I do with my dog and he wags his take and shits on my lawn as well.
By the way, how many bums do you let sleep at your nice place every night? Wouldn't that actually END "home"lessness for someone?