Today is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the world are writing about water as a global issue.
I'm taking the stance: think globally, act locally.
By local, I mean right here in my own sweet home, or rather by my personal action. You see, I've been working not too successfully for two years to STOP using bottled water. I wrote the following statement on my annual goals for 2009 and 2010. "I will consistently use my Kleen Kanteen to carry water with me."
Notice that I had to write it two years in a row. That's because I did not manage to do this in 2009, and it now that it is October 2010, I can say that I'm not faring much better this year. But with this post and this day-- Blog Action Day-- I'm recommitting myself.
WHY?
FACT 1: In the US, we buy an average of 200 bottles of water per person per year.
FACT 2: 17 million gallons of oil a year are needed to produce these plastic bottles.
FACT 3: More than 86% of those bottles are not recycled.
Here's the thing. Somehowm my taste buds tell me that the bottled water tastes better than our tap water. However, according to Annie Leonard who wrote the book The Story of Bottled Water, "Companies like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Nestle, the big three water bottlers, are actually sucking municipal water systems for the product they bottle and sell back to us for hundreds and even thousands of times the cost."
So I've been duped. The solution? I simply need to train my mouth to enjoy the water from the tap that I put into my Kleen Kanteen. And I can do that by consistently drinking from my Kleen Kanteen.
By so doing, I subtract my infinitesimal numbers from those in FACTS 1, 2, & 3.
I offer this tiny sacrifice to :
3.6 million people who die each year because they don't have clean water to drink and 4,000 children younger than 5 who die every day from preventable, water-borne diseases.
2 comments:
Great article! I wrote one as well. I hope we can share our posts. Feel free to stop by my blog and say hi! http://thewaterfilterladysblog.com
I really appreciate your continued commitment to changing this habit. I drank bottled water from 1996 until 2005-6. I too thought it tasted better than my city's tap water. I started out by installing a filter on my tap water that took out the chlorine, along with any pathogens that might be lurking. I began to think the water tasted sweeter more consistently than my brand of bottled water. Eventually, our filter died and I kept forgetting to buy a new one. In the meantime, I kept drinking tap water. Turns out, it's delicious. What's more, our city is listed as having more pure water than most bottled waters. I carry my Kleen Kanteen wherever I go. It's easier than the plastic bottle because I can hook my finger through the loop in the cap. I never run out of water because I can always find a tap from which to fill it. So many benefits to carrying your own! One of the biggest of which is we're no longer buying cases of water every week.
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