A while ago I blogged about the power of marketing. As a follow up I was disgusted to find out the following fact:
In the USA 2 million plastic water bottles are consumed every hour. This is the equivalent of the annual Co2 emissions of nearly 1 million cars.
I have two messages:
1 – Don’t be lazy, re-use a bottle, use a glass, drink tap water where safe.
2 – Marketers & entrepreneurs, please use your power for good.
Another solution to offer to improve upon the plastic bottle situations…Make Recycling More Profitable for businesses to come up with stuff to make out of the plastic bottles….more people would recycle if they trusted that something was done to the plastic bottles other than taken away in a fancy clean truck just to be dumped in the landfill…let someone get filthy rich off making something out of the stuff that would just be buried in a landfill. Maybe that would create more jobs…who knows what this would do to the economy
Just a suggestions.
The truly scary part is that it appears that the two largest bottled water brands in the US are selling bottle tap water!!!
So folks are paying a price per litre higher than for petrol and all they’re really paying for is the slight convenience of carrying water with them (somewhat unneccessary unless you’re actually traversing a desert). In the meantime the efficient and much more environmentally justifiable delivery mechanisms for water that we’ve spent centuries building up (reservoirs, pipelines, taps) have been usurped by the disaster that is delivery by trucks… absolute lunacy. Where is the rational consumer???
It’s ludacris isn’t it. I couldn’t believe the stat I read this morning about Coke requiring 2.52 litres of water per litre of coke produced…but there you go. The whole bottled water thing is even more silly. I love Dr Dre’s comment – reservoirs, pipelines and taps have been made redundant by bloody trucks.
On the other hand, it does value water appropriately. The functions and ‘services’ which nature grant us (such as air, water nutrition etc etc) would cost many times the US account deficiet…in the 100x trillions (i think…can’t remember the stats, but when you find something else that produces air,with it’s perfect mix of No2, O2 and inert gases, WITHOUT any waste and for free…let me know).
Why shouldn’t we be pricing water at it’s actual value, rather than its simple (and clearly incorrect) market value?
Paul Hawken’s book, Natural Capitalism, is a must read. http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Capitalism-Creating-Industrial-Revolution/dp/0316353000