Think Bigg

In case you missed it, the newest environmental bogeyman is not your gas-guzzling car or your kid’s disposable diapers: it’s your bottled water!

Whether you go for high-priced status symbols like Voss, or you’re a more mainstream fan of Pepsi’s Aquafina or Coke’s Dasani, you’re contributing your share to what is now a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry.

Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets–$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year. Source

According to a recent article in the NY Times,

The argument centers not on water, but oil. It takes 1.5 million barrels a year just to make the plastic water bottles Americans use, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, plus countless barrels to transport it from as far as Fiji and refrigerate it.

FastCompany’s frank editorial is what initially got me thinking:

A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it’s just a bottle of water–modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don’t need–when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation–it’s worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is.

While I was in India, we each had one 1L disposable water bottle that we used and re-used for an entire week. It wasn’t ideal from a sanitary standpoint, or from a durability standpoint for that matter, but it definitely made us conscious of how much trash we generate in the course of an average day, and how much of it is truly unnecessary.

When we’re blessed to live in a country where safe, clean water comes right out of the tap whenever we want it, and then we proceed to spend $16 billion a year to purchase something that we could ultimately drink for free, what does that say about us as a society?

According to Forbes,

In 2004, the U.S. budget for international assistance programs around the world was $17 billion, less than 1% of the federal budget overall. Now the U.S. may spend more than that on a single country. The current U.S. budget allocates $4.4 billion of the $17 billion to what the Office of Management and Budget calls “foreign military financing.” The second-largest line item is “economic support,” which comes to $2.5 billion.

So the total amount we spent drinking water out of fancy bottles last year was at least $1 billion more than we spent in foreign aid in 2004 (and $3.6 more if you don’t count the money we spent to provide military assistance).

Bottom line? I’m loving my new Nalgene bottle.