Banning Bottled Water?

Do you prefer drinking water from the tap or from a bottle? Concord, Massachusetts is the first city to ban the sale of bottled water in May. Many believe that the plastic bottles create waste and the production of plastic is not good for air quality.

I personally prefer to drink bottled water. My drinking water comes from a river, and a few weeks ago reservoirs were releasing water into the river. This usually isn’t a problem, but these reservoirs are filling up with silt and now we are getting blue algae blooms. The taste had a similar drinking water out of the fish aquarium. Not pleasant. One office has that 5 gallon water cooler. The other office I thought had a filter on the ice/water machine. However, my hot tea cup stains after one use, and I’ve never had the problem at home or other offices before; and this was before the algae bloom.

I was also reading that the EPA has stated that our national water infrastructure is going to need $335 billion in maintenance. Unfortunately, this does seem to very true. At least in my community I don’t see where we are planning for the future. In many ways our infrastructure is what made the USA great, and now we are letting it age and figure it will last forever.

Apparently the Beverage Marketing Corporation states that the bottled water sales average to 28 gallons a person. This tells me that many of us do not like the taste of the water that comes out of the tap. Is there a way that it could taste better? Or is this really more a matter of convenience?

I personally don’t think banning water is a good thing. I just read about a boil order advisory issued do to a major water main break. Also bottled water is one of the necessities when it comes to a disaster to keep victims and emergency workers hydrated. How many times does someone drink bottled water rather than a sugar loaded drink because of the convenience? Maybe we should have water bottle refill spots to encourage people to use their Nalgene, stainless steel, or similar reusable bottles and get filtered cold water for a quarter.

-Disaster Chick

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