"Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser"<p>Yeah, and I think that telling other people what to do with their lives in order to prevent the emission of miniscule amounts of CO2 should be as unfashionable as smoking too, but hell, what would I know?
FTFA:<p>'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'<p>And?<p>How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?<p>Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals for consumption?<p>Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?<p>This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the choice of battles to fight seems goofy.
A doctor told me that if you don't have a water filter, <i>you</i> are the water filter. That being said, the difference between the quality of most municipal tap water and bottled water is marketing dollars. In some countries, it is a fact that you have to boil the water before drinking it. I was so nervous about avoiding sickness on my last trip to a Latin American country that I used bottled water (on my doctor's recommendation) to rinse out my toothbrush and avoided salad.
This reminds me of the people who shop at Whole Foods yet dont recycle and celebrities who drive hybrid cars yet live in 10k sq. ft. houses where the AC/heating bill is hundreds/month. Classic human paradox of how hard it is to do everything right and/or people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
Some related commentary<p><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_sacrifice_for_the_cli.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_s...</a>