Bottled water in my opinion is immoral; the manner in which we depend on soda companies such as Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola to provide us with clean, safe bottled drinking water is not only an environmental waste but an immoral step to a dependence on filtered lies.
“The Story of Stuff Project” is an Internet source geared toward educating the public about the gritty truths big time corporations don’t want you, the consumer, to know. These companies influence the use of bottled water to the consumers by pitching ads that draw us toward the luxuries of having a pure, fresh ration of bottled water, rather than the dirty, grungy water that comes from the tap.
Some of these companies stretch their lies by using advertising logos of gaping mountainsides with ice caps releasing fresh filtered water down their river faces, while hiding the fact that they use their own water tap as their water source.
Through campaigns, such as these cleverly schemed ads they convince the masses that tap water is polluted, impure and harmful, when in the use of a Brita or Pur water filter container can actually provide a quality of water as good or of better quality than any bottling company would deem safe.
With this knowledge it is better to use one’s hard earned money toward a filtration system that will last them many months out of the year, with nothing but a simple replacement of a filter. It costs twice as much money, along with the use of natural resources like oil and water, to provide one bottle of water than to provide the same amount of filtered tap water.
After speaking with David Shibley, an Environmental Science Major at Humboldt State University, it was brought to my attention that there is currently a land mass of plastic bottles the size of Texas off the North West Pacific Coast comprised of the remains of many failed attempts to ship bottles and other plastic waste over-seas.
Shibley elaborated on a fact that most bottled water users who do recycle are mislead when they see green arrows forming a recycling pattern. The plastic bottles that do reach India are broken down into second grade plastics. Which are ashy and carry healthy many health risks. This reprocessing of our waste plastics further increases pollution and waste materials and eventually leaves foreign countries with the remains of our waste. Our trash becomes their burden.
It is apparent that the production of such wasteful means has become a system of crisis. Recycling alone has proven to be a wasteful endeavor because of the fuels needed to send cargo ships overseas, the air and ocean pollution from the ships and the residue from reprocessing plastics. The only way to minimize a carbon footprint, which is a measure of the greenhouse gases that are produced by activities that involve burning fossil fuels, is to use canteens and water resources that are publicly available.
-By Wesley Horowitz
