coolmelbourne.org

Put your hand up if you are happy to pay 1,000 times over the odds for anything. No hands showing? Now put your hand up if you would buy a bottle of something down at the shops for $2.50 that you can get for free with no effort. No hands showing? Well the hands should be up - this is what millions of us do every day. Are we fair-dinkum dills?

This is what we do with water in Australia. Australians spend over $300 million on bottled water every year. It has to be packaged, transported and chilled before it gets to us. This creates over 60,000 tons of greenhouses gases a year in Australia alone. Did anyone have a clue how wasteful this is? We didn’t either, but we have now found out ...
   
* The manufacture of the bottles for all this water alone requires over 460,000 barrels of oil (associated transportation costs not included).
* Then we have the rubbish problem. Less than 40% of these bottles are recycled; the balance ends up in landfill.
* Recycling just one bottle saves enough to power a television for 90 minutes. This means simply recycling one bottle makes a big difference, the more we recycle the better.    

When Australia was first introduced to bottled water in the late 1980s, we all thought it was a joke. We thought Aussies would never buy bottled water. Well, the joke is on us! In a triumph of marketing over reason we are being conned by the advertising of multinationals (mainly Coca Cola and Nestle) again!

Where does all this bottled water come from? Clean, peaceful rivers and bubbling mountain brooks? No! It’s mostly bore water pumped out of the ground.

Let’s get back to the tap. This is a growing movement that is gaining momentum - from Paris to San Francisco, to Melbourne, to restaurants and to schools. Growing numbers of people are sacking bottled water and returning to the humble tap, a move that appeals to the common sense in all of us.

It makes no sense to load up ships with millions of bottles of water, ship them around the world before loading them on a truck to cover hundreds more kilometres before finally arriving at the restaurant, where they are drunk and (hopefully) recycled. But still 60% end up in landfill.

Governments around the world are beginning to ban the use of bottled water in workplaces and replacing them with ... wait for it – an old fashioned glass or mug. (If you haven’t seen one for a while, it’s a receptacle with a hole at one end that you fill up with liquid. Some even come with lovely designs, zany slogans or wacky sayings.)

If you feel you still need a filtered drink, there are a host of filter jug systems available or you can get a filter fitted to your kitchen tap.

By the way, what’s with these huge water fountain bottles that are plugged into a power point 24 hours a day to put a lovely little chill on the water for those with delicate pallates? Every time it makes that glug-glug-glug noise, consider that as a timely reminder of the emissions it’s helping pump out. Get rid of it - the water is tainted by pollution.

A simple change in our behaviour can make a difference. Start swapping bottled water with tap water today.