Nearly every third world country I’ve ever visited, I’ve noticed that litter is a problem. Actually litter is the wrong word: refuse pollution might be a better term. I’m looking for a word or phrase that sums up the horrible, wretched mess that is made when a million/billion-strong mass of humanity dumps its garbage around without having a sensible public policy for cleaning it up. You know what I’m talking about. And when you look at all this refuse, you usually notice that one type of item predominates: the water bottle. It makes sense, of course. The water in many big cities and in other countries around the world is unhealthy. The first thing you learn when you go to a place like is “don’t drink the water.” But it turns out that this may not be true. Well, perhaps it is for , but it might not be for other big cities.
A fascinating new report from the EPI shows that bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, and yet it can be as much as 10,000 times more expensive. Not just costly in a strict dollar sense either. As I mentioned above the pollution problems associated with bottled water put a heavy strain on the environment. And its not just the litter quotient, either. When you add up the energy it takes to MAKE these bottles, why, things get even worse. It’s a fascinating look at a common problem that is not particularly well addressed, I don’t think. How to convince people that their water is safe to drink from the taps? We drink the water here in