Water, Water Everywhere...

I’ve written before about being brought up in an environmental household where conservation of energy was a priority. As a family, we did (and still do) all of David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge suggestions before they were identified as “necessary”. I try to live my life as greenly as possible.

I cannot, however, ride my own locally sourced organic cotton coattails. There is always room for improvement in terms of lessening my environmental footprint. Moving schools so that I can now walk to work and imposing an air travel ban for the past year are two ways I have made change. My next step is something that is all over the media right now: bottled water.

Suzuki spoke out against bottled water earlier this year, some religious groups have labelled bottled water “immoral” and Justin Trudeau refused a proffered bottle after coughing during a speech at McGill with the words: “I try not to.”

There has also been much written on the topic of bottled water, its true benefits and environmental impact. The Trudeau anecdote was taken from Judith Timson’s column in today’s Globe and Mail. In it, Timson argues that the omnipresent water bottle is about hydration and oral fixation: it’s a socially acceptable thing to have in our hands (and mouths) at just about any event (Timson relates an anecdote of water bottle swilling at a funeral).

Certainly hydration, and all the beautiful benefits that come with it was the main impetus for the explosion of bottled water sales. Back in the early 90s, in the era of the Supermodel, gorgeous, fresh-faced girls with large bottles of Evian were the first to be seen with portable water. And just as that spring water you’re imbibing trickles down the mountain side, so did the trend trickle down into the hoi polloi. Having water available in bottles is now de rigueur in homes, offices and public places around the world.

But that’s another issue with this whole bottled water thing (and a point that Timson briefly makes in her piece) – in the Western world, we pay more per litre for water (a resource, I don’t need to point out, that is basically free in this country) than gas, yet there are more than a billion people around the world who do not have access to safe drinking water. And to really put this Western life in perspective, the previous link informs us that “[a] person living in Sub-Saharan Africa uses 10-20 litres a day; on average, a Canadian uses 326 litres a day.”

Water, which accounts for the make up of over two-thirds of our bodies and our earth, is an important environmental and world issue. So what to do?

I am giving up water in plastic bottles. I originally began buying spring water because I could easily stick it in the fridge. I grew accustomed to the taste as well as the ease with which you could take water with you. And even though I was reusing the same plastic water bottle for a week or so at a time (filling it up from another plastic bottle I kept in the fridge), I was still creating quite the mountain of recyclable waste, while ignoring the first (and most important) of the 3 Rs: reduce.

And so I have bought one of those aluminum water bottles (not the plastic kind, which have suffered the same criticism as regular water bottles: chemicals leaching into their contents), a trend that Timson doesn’t see as “catching on”. On this point, I whole-heartedly disagree. Many of my friends carry this type of water bottle (it was in discussion with two of them that I decided on this course of action) and I am seeing them more and more in the hands of the young and funky (and well-informed) around the city.

I even thought about buying my parents aluminum water bottles. But they're already ahead of me. They drink tap water out of a glass - something they've done even before David Suzuki suggested it.