Australians ban bottled water

http://www.reuters.com/article/envir...BrandChannel=0

I like this idea, as stock piles of plastic bottles are a terrible sight. I've been to beautiful jungles, only to have the experience ruined by the sight of mounds of used plastic bottles dropped off and forgotten about.
One the flip side, my city's water tastes really bad. Chalk full of chemicals that leave a bad after taste. I would hate to have my Culligan water source disappear because city hall made a similar move.
I refill an 18 liter jug of purified water about once a month at my local grocery store, and it costs me less than $5. Even though the price is meager, it still causes me to drink more water, which is a good thing. Whenever I go to yoga, or climb, bike, hike whatever, I just fill my Nalgene bottles at home and I'm all set.

I don't think that the big bottles of water is the problem here; it's the thousands of little ones that is. You already are doing what they want us to do and thats reuse a bottle, such as a nalgene or other. bring your water with you and don't be buying a new bottle every time you get thirsty.

I like the way this is looking!

An alternative suggestion: make wanton littering and trash dumping illegal.

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An alternative suggestion: make wanton littering and trash dumping illegal.

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Good in theory, but how do you enforce this?

Banning things is stupid, if we must prevent use (and I'm not convinced it matters), it should be taxed at a high rate. That way if you really want bottled water or lightbulbs or whatever you can still get them, just be prepared to sacrifice.

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Originally posted by Blog
Banning things is stupid, if we must prevent use (and I'm not convinced it matters), it should be taxed at a high rate. That way if you really want bottled water or lightbulbs or whatever you can still get them, just be prepared to sacrifice.

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That's really a regressive solution which punishes people who can't afford the tax hike way more than it does people who can.

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Originally posted by Malacasta
That's really a regressive solution which punishes people who can't afford the tax hike way more than it does people who can.

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So the people who can't afford the new tax are the first to stop using the thing that's being discouraged? Big deal.

However, I don't think taxation is the right solution in this case. Bottled water is already stupidly expensive compared to the alternatives (apart from the obvious tap water, I can get a 1.5L bottle of lime lemonade for 89c or 82c, and pop-top reusable bottles come in all shapes and sizes at not much more than their contents would justify), and people buy it, so adding a punitive tax won't stop that.

But there's a question here of where you draw the line. For instance, I'm sure people will agree that the bottle of lemonade I mentioned above is NOT bottled water, even though it's perfectly reasonable to treat it as a drink bottle and not something to decant from. What about those flavored waters though? Are they bottled water, or are they some other drink that happens to be more watery than most? What _exactly_ is restricted (or taxed, as the case may be)?

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Originally posted by kestra
Good in theory, but how do you enforce this?

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Anyone who gets caught doing it gets prosecuted.

People who litter are already fined pretty heavily, and millions of people still do it.

I'm not saying I have a better idea, and I like that ignorant and selfish arseholes get punished in the pocket, just saying that it doesn't appear to be terribly effective as a deterrent.

Banning things like this is stupid.

For one thing, when people find themselves in need of a cool drink and go to a vending machine, the ban has removed the choice of (healthy) water and allows only for (unhealthy) pepsi, etc.

Secondly, I've been doing a lot of travelling lately and when away from home, buying a bottle of water at a shop is the only way to stay hydrated (unless I want to pay a 2 euro cover charge just to be able to sit in a restaurant that sells water for 4 euros per glass).

I've also read in the news about a town in the (I think) USA that implemented a similar ban, and it prevented firefighters from bringing bottles of water with them on the job.

All three of these points tend to characterize what is almost a universal problem with zero-tolerance type bans - they ignore common sense. I also don't buy the argument that this is at all related to litter, or the environment. Plastic bottles are one of the easiest things in the world to recycle, and enforcing a ban on a product in order to reduce litter seems just as problematic as enforcing a ban on litter itself.

I'd rather punish the folks doing something inherently wrong (littering / dumping) than punish the folks who aren't doing something inherently wrong (drinking water out of a bottle).

We need more drinking fountains. I get so pissed off if I'm at the zoo or in the city and my daughter runs out of water and I have to buy water instead of just going to a drinking fountain.

It pisses me off no end that companies like coca cola get to bottle our (very limited in OZ) water supplies to sell for like a gazillion per cent mark up. It's freaking infuriating as a tax payer that we subsidize their freaking profits. And coke has a shocking reputation and they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near water. Take this for an example

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First, Coca-Cola's new brand of "pure" bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its "highly sophisticated purification process", based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that.

The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

So now the full scale of Coke's PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it "pure" and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for "taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide - which is not a problem - into bromate - which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre).

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/mar/20/medicineandhealth.lifeandhealth

Someone explain to me why plastic water bottles are so bad for the environment that they need to be banned, but plastic soda/iced tea/lemonade/etc. bottles are just fine and did not get banned. I smell BS. I guess the bottled water lobbyists simply didn't pay as much as the other groups this year and this is their punishment (I'm only half serious about that bit).

As an aside, citizens need to not allow their governments to get comfortable simply banning relatively trivial things (which this is) arbitrarily. If this ban isn't overturned, then it is a failure on the part of the Australian citizens in question.

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Originally posted by Kerrin
I'd rather punish the folks doing something inherently wrong (littering / dumping) than punish the folks who aren't doing something inherently wrong (drinking water out of a bottle).

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So would I, if you're responding to me.

Again, if your response is to me, I wasn't saying that people shouldn't be punished for littering, I'm all for it, and I do think this whole thing is silly micromanagement, I just stated that fining doesn't seem to really work as a deterrent.

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As an aside, citizens need to not allow their governments to get comfortable simply banning relatively trivial things (which this is) arbitrarily. If this ban isn't overturned, then it is a failure on the part of the Australian citizens in question.

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As far as I know, it was the citizens who instigated and called for it, and it has been met with acclaim where it has been implemented.

It was the idea of a shop owner, not some suit.

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Residents of rural Bundanoon, a picturesque, tourist destination 150 kms (93 miles) southwest of Sydney, voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to rid the town of bottled water to combat the carbon footprint from bottling and transporting it.

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Residents of rural Bundanoon, a picturesque, tourist destination 150 kms (93 miles) southwest of Sydney, voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to rid the town of bottled water to combat the carbon footprint from bottling and transporting it.

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To inject some science here in regard to the bolded claim, transporting water in bottles or containers on trucks is far more efficient (i.e. less energy, i.e. less pollution) than pressurizing an entire network of water main pipes than run for hundreds of miles underground.

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Originally posted by Snrrub
To inject some science here in regard to the bolded claim, transporting water in bottles or containers on trucks is far more efficient (i.e. less energy, i.e. less pollution) than pressurizing an entire network of water main pipes than run for hundreds of miles underground.

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While I imagine this is certainly true, I need to ask a genuine question.

Assuming that such a water network is already in place, would the small additional load in the pipes create more carbon wastage or do you mean an entirely new system?

Also, I don't know anything about bottling procedures etc, but do you know if that produces a lot of adverse environmental effects?

To be honest, I think that this reaction was more of a "not in my back yard" kind of thing.

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Originally posted by Malacasta
That's really a regressive solution which punishes people who can't afford the tax hike way more than it does people who can.

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This attitude is probably why they went with the ban. There are plenty of alternatives in this case so it doesn't really matter. If someone wants to pay $5 for a bottle of water, I say let them, maybe it will lower my taxes.

The tax on SUVs or private jets is higher than that on other vehicles, is that punishing?- maybe, but no one cares because there are alternatives.

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Originally posted by Snrrub
To inject some science here in regard to the bolded claim, transporting water in bottles or containers on trucks is far more efficient (i.e. less energy, i.e. less pollution) than pressurizing an entire network of water main pipes than run for hundreds of miles underground.

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This is incorrect, it requires very little energy to run a tap water system, to pressurize it all you only need to move the water 200 ft or so up into a water tower.

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Originally posted by Blog
This is incorrect, it requires very little energy to run a tap water system, to pressurize it all you only need to move the water 200 ft or so up into a water tower.

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You're discounting the need to transport water to the tower in the first place. The fact remains that in a modern water supply system, the entire piping network remains under pressure, and this is mostly accomplished at the treatment plant using a motorized pumping system. There is also the issue of up-front energy cost of laying the piping system.

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Originally posted by Snrrub
You're discounting the need to transport water to the tower in the first place. The fact remains that in a modern water supply system, the entire piping network remains under pressure, and this is mostly accomplished at the treatment plant using a motorized pumping system. There is also the issue of up-front energy cost of laying the piping system.

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Isn't the point that bottled water is an additional use of resources? Surely piped water is necessary for modern cities. I can't imagine what would be necessary to reoutfit cities to survive off rain water tanks and the like instead of dam water and bottled water. I mean, I daresay it's doable and even possibly necessary in some places. But are you saying that using bottled water for drinking water is less resource heavy than using tap water for drinking water even when you're using tap water for showers, toilets, washing, watering gardens etc? (And you're not taking into account the companies that bottle tap water)

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Originally posted by Malacasta
... But are you saying that using bottled water for drinking water is less resource heavy than using tap water for drinking water even when you're using tap water for showers, toilets, washing, watering gardens etc? (And you're not taking into account the companies that bottle tap water)

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Personally I don't think that we should have just one or the other, but rather both underground infrastructure and bottled water, because that's the only reasonable way to do it. I could probably make the case that if people were to exclusively drink bottled water, then the reduced capacity requirement on the water system could allow for smaller diameter pipes, and so on, which could yield a net energy savings. But my primary point is that work is needed to transport water from wherever it is produced to the drinker's mouth, and that transportation (energy) cost for tap water isn't zero, nor is it conclusively better than for bottled water; indeed it could be worse.

In addition to my initial reasons for supporting the availability of bottled water that I made in my first post, I should also point out that without bottled water people become entirely dependent on the underground water distribution system, which is not entirely reliable. Where I live in Canada, there are rare days in which the city issues an advisory urging citizens to boil their water before drinking it, which isn't always practical. For another example, during the large blackout of 2003 my house lost water pressure entirely. During this type of semi-emergency, availability of bottled water throughout the city is more than a luxury.

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I could probably make the case that if people were to exclusively drink bottled water, then the reduced capacity requirement on the water system could allow for smaller diameter pipes, and so on, which could yield a net energy savings.

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They certainly wouldn't make cost savings.

The cost to the consumer in England (not Britain) of one litre of tap water is 0.08 pence per litre. Bottled water, so far, can come nowhere near close to that.

As for downgrading the water system to smaller pipes to make a net energy saving, well, I imagine such a task (digging up and replacing thousands of miles of pipes) would be incredibly energy intensive, could it really reliably make a net saving? How long would it take just to break even?