Australian town bans bottled water

[Watser?]

A rural town in Australia has voted overwhelmingly to ban the sale of bottled water over concerns about its environmental impact.

Campaigners say Bundanoon, in New South Wales, may be the first community in the world to have such a ban.

...

Campaigner John Dee said local opinion had been incensed when a drinks company announced plans to tap an underground reservoir in the town.

"The company has been looking to extract water locally, bottle it in Sydney and bring it back here to sell it," he said.

"It made people look at the environmental impact of bottled water and the community has been quite vocal about it."

The ban has been supported by shopkeepers in the town, which has a population of about 2,500.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Australia town bans bottled water

I reckon it's about bloody time someone did that. Good on yer.

[1Samuel8]

That sucks. Carrying a bottle of water around with you everywhere is sexy.

Shit, what will those wacky kiwis think of next? Banning sun tans!?!

[Watser?]

What will those wacky corporations think of selling next? Bottles of fresh air?

Btw, Kiwis are New Zealanders...

[Adam]

I would totally buy fresh bottled air.

[BrotherMan]

[lisarea]

OK, so I don't like the environmental impact involved in unnecessarily bottling and transporting water, either.

But that assumes that people buy bottled water as an alternative to drinking tap water from a reusable container. What about people who are buying bottled water as an alternative to soda or something, which is even worse?

[godfry n. glad]

Okay...I can relate. And...at the same time, there is a warning inherent, which I'll bet is being missed.

After visiting Israel, I'm foresquare in favor of doing something which will prevent, or at least reduce, the literal piles of flattened and crumpled plastic water bottles which have been disposed of by chucking them out on the roadside.

The beaches on the Med Sea were littered with plastic garbage, mostly discarded water bottles. It's actually quite disgusting, particularly in concert with the North Pacific Gyre news.

But...Bottled water is, curiously, a near necessity for westerners traveling overseas outside of the 'western' nations....sometimes even within western nations, if sufficiently remote. Water on the planet which is readily potable is a relative rarity. Water can be a carrier of many diseases and disabilities, and does for much of the world. There is a place for bottled water...what should go with it is a means of reusing and/or recycling the containers and prevention their careless disposal.

At one time, we had a problem with beer and soda cans and bottles being chucked out on the verges of state highways and byways. A 'bottle bill' passed that required a five cent deposit be placed on each and every beer and soda can sold in the state, and required that any outlet which sold the product with the deposit bottle or can redeem the empties. The litter problem associated with roadside bottles and cans disappeared.

That has been challenged of late by the popularity of things like 'energy drinks', fruit juices, chai, coffee...and water. None of these relatively new retail beverages is required to have an accompanying container deposit. Result: Increase in visible litter, most of it plastic (when not plasticized or waxed convenience food outlet litter).

The retail industry hates it because they were saddled with the whole redemption thing, which they didn't want to get their hands dirty with. They've bitched about it for years, despite it's clear popularity with the general public. Attempts have been made to expand it, but it's been pretty limited in terms of gains because of the retailer resistance.

So...why does bottled water sell where you live? Around here, it's kind of odd, in my estimation. The tap water has been tested against the leading bottled waters and found to be more pure. The city even toyed with the idea of bottling and marketing Bull Run Water...but for the unfortunate name. Yet, I see scads of people packing around name-brand water bottles. I'm not sure why, but it is trendy. Even here. I do know that the building in which I work, a fifteen-year old 'architectual award winning building', has had crappy, tepid, metallic tasting, water since the day it opened its doors to the poor stiffs shackled to their oars within the confines...and the public. We stiffs have to either bring our own water from outside the building, or pay extra to use the bottled chilled water in a cooler that the employees pay a service to bring in.

There are ways to address the spread of all of this trash around us, but I think it means 're-educating' people, something a lot of snotty, snarky people resist, because they don't like others nanny attitudes about their actions. These are often the same people who would crap in the middle of your new carpet, just for the LULZ.

Good luck to the folks in Bundanoon.

I am wondering what the penalty for sale or use of bottled water in the town will be....a week, two weeks, confined to drinking their tainted tap water? No...better...picking up roadside trash.

[Adam]

It also assumes that people have access to decent tap water. Before I spent a fuckton of cash on a good softener, my tap water tasted like ass, so I'd buy bottled water to drink (eventually, I discovered that there was an artisan well at a local park and started refilling my bottles there). Like, literally, ass. I'm pretty sure that, if I follow my pipes to the source, I'll find that they eventually just plug into an enormous ass somewhere.

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

But...Bottled water is, curiously, a near necessity for westerners traveling overseas outside of the 'western' nations....sometimes even within western nations, if sufficiently remote.

I am not so sure it is as bad as most travelers think. I used to only drink bottled water when traveling as well, but then in Syria there wasn't any bottled water for sale and I had to drink the tap water. It didn't do any harm and it didn't taste bad either.

I'm sure there are places where the water is undrinkable but it is often only an assumption people have.

[godfry n. glad]

My understanding from our guides (across China and central Asia...and St. Petersburg!) is that they cannot guarantee that the water wherever they escort you will be adequate to protect you from unwanted consequences, which is why they always recommended that we have bottled water...that was a name brand and sealed when acquired...and that we even brush our teeth using bottled water, and not even rinse off our brush with tap water, either. Modest changes in biota can engender some fairly severe results...well, ones one does not wish to experience far from the home throne.

[Dingfod]

↑
The voice of experience.

[Miisa]

Here water bottles must also be deposit bottles. Virtually no bottles anywhere, at least not for long; coin-scavenging kids will pick them up for the money. But it should be more than 5 cents: 15 or 20, at least.

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by Miisa

Here water bottles must also be deposit bottles. Virtually no bottles anywhere, at least not for long; coin-scavenging kids will pick them up for the money. But it should be more than 5 cents: 15 or 20, at least.

Yeah, that's one way the free market works pretty well. These days all the major festivals here use plastic deposit glasses. There are always enough kids around to collect them.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

These are often the same people who would crap in the middle of your new carpet, just for the LULZ.

Yeah man, and that rug really tied the room together, too.

[Adam]

Where the fuck do you people (OK, I guess mostly godfry, since others have only mentioend it to say that they don't see it) live that there's this plague of discarded drink bottle litter? We don't have any kind of deposit on bottles here, and I rarely see that sort of thing.

[Miisa]

[Zehava]

Originally Posted by Adam

Where the fuck do you people (OK, I guess mostly godfry, since others have only mentioend it to say that they don't see it) live that there's this plague of discarded drink bottle litter? We don't have any kind of deposit on bottles here, and I rarely see that sort of thing.

Things definitely are not as bad as they were before the bottle bill (or hell even when I was a little kid). That said I will note that I do see any increase in road side litter when I head out to my parents house in rural Sandy.

The end of the road they live on has been a notorious hang out for high schoolers for decades, though it has gotten better over the years. When I was a kid, we would take a walk down to the creek ~1/2 a mile and come back with $2-$5 worth of nickel and dime deposit bottles every few months.

I suspect, as GnG travels quite a bit, that he sees this in the more rural parts of the state. If not I'll let him answer.

[Clutch Munny]

I think it's unclear to what extent tour guides, health websites, etc., recommend bottled water as a form of covering their asses, or of just fending off a million fucking questions with every busload of tourists about whether the water is also okay at this rest stop, and not just the last rest stop.

I drank the same water the locals drank everywhere I went in the world -- including many regions of China, where I once lived, and through parts of the Middle East. The stomach problems I had were few and far between, and were probably as much due to food as to water. Anecdotal, but there you go.

[godfry n. glad]

Any interstate freeway in the west, Z.

I know you've seen the crews...usually groups of miscreants doing penance for minor crimes like DUII and shoplifting....orange vests filling large orange plastic bags.

For that matter, even regular Oregon highways have these crews on occasion.

And then...Perhaps you've not noticed them, but there are occasionally little signs dedicated to acknowledging the volunteers who commit to regularly picking up the roadsides. And what are they picking up? LITTER!

Um...Here's some info I found looking for data from Oregon's not-for-profit statewide organization, SOLV (Stop Oregon Litter & Vandalism), which amongst other efforts, organizes an annual 'beach-cleanup day'. They also sponsor roadside cleanups and push for the inclusion of more types of bottles within the deposit bottle law.

If you really want to see the hideous results of humans, start riding the public transit some time. Around here, bus stops, unless they are sponsored by an active presence to clean it up, rapidly become shitholes of disposed trash, usually convenience food wrappers, beverage bottles and cigarette butts. This is in each and every American city I have ever been in. Then there is the garbage that is scrawled all over the seating, walls and shelters, advertising the low mental abilities of former visitors.

A cute little pdf from Georgia DoT. So...It seems they have a problem, as well.

I think Adam has a problem as well...seeing the obvious.

Perhaps he just ignores it in hopes they'll not bag and remove him?

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by Clutch Munny

I think it's unclear to what extent tour guides, health websites, etc., recommend bottled water as a form of covering their asses, or of just fending off a million fucking questions with every busload of tourists about whether the water is also okay at this rest stop, and not just the last rest stop.

I drank the same water the locals drank everywhere I went in the world -- including many regions of China, where I once lived, and through parts of the Middle East. The stomach problems I had were few and far between, and were probably as much due to food as to water. Anecdotal, but there you go.

I have the same anecdotal evidence although I didn't drink the local water everywhere I went,

The times I was really sick as in coming out of both ends were definitely from the food.

[chunksmediocrites]

Paris had a reeducation campaign about the quality of Parisian tap-water back in '05.

Apologies if this is repetition of the known: from NYT 3/19/08.

The energy required to make water bottles in the United States is equivalent to 17 million barrels of oil annually, Gleick said. Globally, the bottling industry uses the equivalent of nearly 100 million barrels of oil each year, excluding transportation. Gleick said the Fiji brand of bottled water sold in Los Angeles traveled about 2,000 miles, or more than 3,000 kilometers, from the source to the store, effectively doubling its use of energy.

Making plastic water bottles causes greenhouse gas emissions and uses water - about three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water, Gleick said.

In the United States, less than 20 percent of water bottles are recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute.

Jane Lazgin, spokeswoman for Nestlé Waters North America, said Nestlé was an industry leader in reducing the plastic in bottles. In April 2007, it introduced a bottle that used 30 percent less plastic than regular bottles. The company planned to move all of its products to the new bottle, she said.

Extraction also can have environmental effect. "Water is a renewable resource," Gleick said. "It's a cycle. But a renewable resource by definition is a flow-limited resource." Overextraction "affects everything around it: flows and rivers and streams, ecosystems, groundwater levels."

Climate change will increase pressure on freshwater supplies, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Gigi Kellett, director of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign with Corporate Accountability International, an organization that fights corporate abuse, said the water bottle industry was changing the public's opinion about water, from a basic right to a commodity.

The supposed quality of bottled water, especially in comparison to tap water, is questionable as well:

The bottled water industry promotes an image of purity, but comprehensive testing by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed, including toxic byproducts of chlorination in Walmart’s Sam’s Choice and Giant Supermarket's Acadia brands, at levels no different than routinely found in tap water. Several Sam's Choice samples purchased in California exceeded legal limits for bottled water contaminants in that state. Cancer-causing contaminants in bottled water purchased in 5 states (North Carolina, California, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland) and the District of Columbia substantially exceeded the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry.

Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry is not required to disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose.

To the contrary, our tests strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted. Given the industry's refusal to make available data to support their claims of superiority, consumer confidence in the purity of bottled water is simply not justified.

Laboratory tests conducted for EWG at one of the country’s leading water quality laboratories found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants altogether, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand. More than one-third of the chemicals found are not regulated in bottled water. In the Sam's Choice and Acadia brands levels of some chemicals exceeded legal limits in California as well as industry-sponsored voluntary safety standards. Four brands were also contaminated with bacteria.

I support at the very least instituting all bottled drinks as returnables and increasing the returns value to $.20 or $.25. I would also like to see a public awareness campaign- filtering water at home or drinking safe tap water is something that needs more attention.

[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by Watser?

I have the same anecdotal evidence although I didn't drink the local water everywhere I went,

The times I was really sick as in coming out of both ends were definitely from the food.

Likewise...Probably food in Samarkand, but it is unclear; I blamed it on the sheshlik. Definitely the food (multitudinous different kinds of dumplings!) in Xi'an. Food related, but possibly the water the fruit was washed in, at Badaling. Samarkand was definitely the worst.

In other news, trying the native kumis high in the mountain passes of the Tian Shan in Kyrgyzstan (rebottled in Coca-Cola bottles, probably none too pristine) was a calculated risk that had no adverse repercussions....other than the immediate taste being like I'd just upchucked a little in my mouth.

These days, the outdoor types are beginning to recommend water purification units for backpackers, POU (point of use purifiers) because, per the wiki 'portable water purification' blurb,

"Large rivers may be polluted with sewage effluent, surface runoff, or industrial pollutants from sources far upstream. However even small streams, springs and wells may be contaminated by animal waste and pathogens. The presence of dead animals upstream is not uncommon. In most parts of the world, water may contain bacterial or protozoa contamination originating from human and animal waste or pathogens which use other organisms as an intermediate host.

Giardia lamblia and Cryptosporidium spp., both of which cause diarrhea (see giardiasis and cryptosporidiosis) are common pathogens. In backcountry areas of the United States and Canada they are sometimes present in sufficient quantity that water treatment is justified for backpackers,[1] although this has created some controversy.[2][3] (See Wilderness acquired diarrhea.) In Hawaii and other tropical areas, Leptospira spp. are another possible problem.[4] (See Leptospirosis.)

Less commonly seen in developed countries are organisms such as Vibrio cholerae which causes cholera and various strains of Salmonella which cause typhoid and para-typhoid diseases. Pathogenic viruses may also be found in water. The larvae of flukes are particularly dangerous in area frequented by sheep, deer, or cattle. If such microscopic larvae are ingested, they can form potentially life threatening cysts in the brain or liver. This risk extends to plants grown in or near water including the commonly eaten watercress."

In less developed nations, where the sophistication of water treatment is not nearly as advanced as those in the US, these conditions are heightened as possibilities.

[Watser?]

My sister lives in a town ('s Hertogenbosch meaning the Duke's forest in ye olde Dutch) which taps its water from a source also used by this water bottling company called Bar-le-Duc (meaning something like the Duke's tap). She even used to buy bottles of that until I told her it was the exact same water flowing out of her tap.

[godfry n. glad]

Yeah...an EWG (Environmental Working Group) research, done in 2000, I think, pointed out that many of the bottled waters, often being sold at prices greater than gasoline in the US, had more contaminants of greater concentrations than many city water systems. Consumer Reports evidently reported the EWG results after a report they ran earlier on bottled waters...

I also understood, from the North Pacific Gyre information site, that disposed plastics trap and hold many toxic materials, meaning that conglomerations of plastics continue to grow more and more toxic over time.

It sure takes a shipload of time, meaning that it grows further and further from human mindfulness, for the waste to grow to proportions difficult to ignore, and even more difficult to adequately deal with...which is where we are now. And we continue to feed it with dubious practices that cater to the worst vanities of humanity.

[California Tanker]

We've been giving the Afghani Bottled Water Company and Coca-Cola's Bagram factory the best profits they've had in decades, I think. Their water bottles are all over the kip here, simply because there is no suitable tap water.

NTM