Plastic water bottles
It takes 1.5 million barrels a year just to make the plastic water
bottles Americans use, according to the Earth Policy Institute in
Washington, plus countless barrels to transport it from as far as Fiji
and refrigerate it.
The issue took a major stride into
mainstream dialogue earlier this summer, after the mayors of San
Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis and New York began urging people
to opt for tap water instead of bottled.
This added momentum to
efforts by environmental groups like Corporate Accountability
International and Food & Water Watch, which have been lobbying
citizens to dump the bottle; environmental organizations had banded
together in several states to pressure governments to extend bottle
bills to include bottled water. Several prominent restaurateurs, like
Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., made much-publicized
moves to drop bottled water from their menus.
AND so people who
had come to consider bottled water a great convenience, or even a mark
of good taste, are now casting guilty glances at their frosty drinks.
Daphne
Domingo Johnson, a life coach who also works for a nonprofit
organization in Seattle, said she used to keep a case of bottled water
“in my trunk for all times, just because I know the importance of
water.” Ms. Johnson, 35, said she thought of reusable plastic Nalgene
bottles — recently reborn as urban status symbols — as “just for
backpackers or athletes.”
read more here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/fashion/12water.html?_r=1&oref=slogin