H2O RLY · posted 30 October 07 under
water, hygiene
The more I read about bottled water, the more I’m starting to find its popularity offensive. Here are my major gripes, in no particular order:
- it’s expensive. Bottled water costs between 240 to 1,000 times on average what tap water does—more than orange juice, delicious farm-pasteurized chocolate milk, or even gasoline. If that isn’t enough to elicit a hearty wtf, I don’t know what is.
- it’s wasteful. Even if you recycle the bottles, it takes a lot of energy to bring them to your grocery store. Half the time, it’s someone else’s tap water you’re paying for, and the rest of the time you’re sponsoring the exploitation of natural water sources that can be compromised as a result.
- it’s not better for you. Aside from missing out on the flouride and other minerals present in tap water (though you may boost your arsenic intake, if that’s what you’re going for), bottled water is generally held to a lower standard than tap. And about the flouride, filters are available for that if you have reason to avoid it.
I don’t think that people should never drink bottled water, but really, it’s a convenience product. I love love love my Brita pitcher, and I would imagine that any of the similar products out there would give it a run for its money. I have also tried the faucet apparatus, but I like that one much less because the water isn’t as cold and thus requires ice, which is made by my freezer with tap water. I know I have other ice options, but living alone, I don’t go through a lot of it, so having fresh delicious ice available for my tap-purified water adds an extra layer of complexity to my life that I don’t need.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of all the things that can be done, but it’s a good place to start. Takeaways: bottled water = bad. Brita filtered water in a nice glass feels more decadent than drinking out of a crunchy plastic bottle anyway. if you need something more portable, try a delicious Nalgene or one of these trendy stainless steel versions that claim to be safer than plastic bottles.
The next time you’re looking to waste time on the internet, check out freerice.com. The site donates 10 grains of rice for every word for which you can guess the correct meaning, courtesy of sponsors whose ads are tasteful and not the least bit distracting/overwhelming/annoying.
The level of difficulty is adjusted to keep you in the zone where you’re most likely to internalize new words, so you might really learn something. And while 10 grains at a time isn’t a lot, I think the success of this site could really inspire a lot of change.
At the Ruby Hoedown last weekend, I attended a small talk about using (the programming language) Ruby for social change. It was at this talk that Ruby for Change was born, a group for Ruby developers to volunteer their services to help improve services or processes for non-profit organizations that might not have the budget to pay for such a thing themselves. The mailing list is really picking up speed, and the group is currently exploring projects to tackle. If you are involved with or know of an NPO that could really benefit from customized software, please drop me a line and I’ll pass it along.
Slightly more on-topic:
Among the people at the talk was the creator of buyindie.net, a site based out of Washington DC that acts as a directory for locally-owned businesses. Several cities already have a great deal of resources listed, and if you don’t live in one of them, you’re welcomed to contribute your own favorite local shops. Check it out!
We all know how great American Apparel is for cute and sweatshop-free clothes, but in the past their prices have seemed a little higher than I could deal with.
However, I recently dipped my toe in the pool by picking up their Cotton Canvas LA-Z Girl Side Pocket Bag and have found that aside from the more obvious uses as a large tote or overnight bag, it’s also amazing as a shopping bag. Since it’s canvas and can be washed easily, I don’t feel bad about putting groceries in it, and it’s a lot more fun/versatile than your average environmentally-friendly grocery sack. Two thumbs up!
It has been estimated that more than 40% of the world’s chocolate is manufactured using west African cocoa harvested by young boys lured away from their homes to be sold as slaves. Did you know that? I mean, I always thought I was pretty up to date with what’s going on in the world, and I definitely didn’t know that. That’s pretty much why this site exists.
I’ve been sitting on this topic for the better part of a month now, and this is what I’ve gathered: the chocolate industry is such that tracing the origin of cocoa is very difficult, and so conclusively identifying culprits has been difficult. Despite this, Nestle has been cited time and time again as one of the most clear offenders in this practice, and according to The Better World Shopping Guide, they are the absolute worst. In addition to the well-documented use of forced labor by children, Nestle has also been implicated in hostile takeovers of family farms and repeatedly accused of launching greenwashing campaigns to mask their destructive practices rather than correct them. In 2001, the company signed the Cocoa Protocol, promising to find a way by July 2005 to certify that their chocolate did not contain cocoa produced by underaged, forced labor. The date has long since come and gone, and all anyone appears to have gotten from Nestle is lip service about the difficulty of the task.
I expect to follow up on this post in the future because it’s kind of a pet issue for me, but in the meantime I have decided to buy organic when I can, buy from the list below when it’s more practical, and buy from Nestle never.
I went to Whole Foods this week (ahhh, delicious research) to buy some chocolate from Endangered Species and Rapunzel, two of the companies most celebrated in the industry for their social responsibility. I wanted to try some organic chocolate before I made any attempt to recommend it on this site, but I certainly didn’t think I’d switch…until I had some. I will try not to get too enthusiastic about my sweet tooth in the context of child labor, but suffice it to say that I have seen heaven, and it is glorious.
Cocoa is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world so it makes sense to buy organic, but if you’re short on suppliers/funds, you might try Cadbury, Hershey’s, Russel Stover, Whitman’s, Ghiarardeli, Lindt, or Droste…all in The Better World Shopping Guide’s next tier for social consciousness. There are no guarantees that these companies are completely innocent, but it doesn’t take an economist to predict what would happen if all the CAs of the world stopped buying Nestle products. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like a single Nestle product that doesn’t have a major competitor, so this quiet boycott really has not changed my lifestyle at all.
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