This weekend's NYT had an article discussing how if you drink bottled water you basically hate the earth and puppies and such. In the fashion section. Oddly enough, it may take the arbiters of style to fill us with enough guilt to stop the mountains of plastic from growing.
You may have already heard the recent spate of scary stats — 30 billion bottles of non-sparkling water sold to Americans in 2005, only a quarter of the bottles are recycled, in 2006 Americans spent more than $10 billion dollars on the stuff, drank more than 28 gallons each. Maybe the stupidest part of the whole evil business? 40% of bottled water comes from the public water supplies. Yep, filtered tap water (I'm looking at you Aquafina).
Not only should you stop buying the stuff, you should start telling your favorite restaurants to stop carrying it. Unless, of course, you aren't fashionable and you hate the earth.
This article appears in Aug 8-14, 2007.