iamgeekfit

Image of two million bottles of water - the amount Americans drink EVERY FIVE MINUTES. from http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

Ever hear the joke about a new mesiah named Evian? he turned water into really expensive water.

It was a clip from an ad on the tube last night: why buy oil, ship it all the way over here to turn into plastic bottles, fill the bottles with water and sell the water, only for that plastic to end up on a landfill?

No kidding. The cost of drinking responsibly is so low: get a bloody bottle. We're spoiled for choice: stainless, colored stainless, polycarb, squishy, suction or pour.... Are we immoral if it's not a choice we're willing to make?

Yes, in case any of us have forgotten, plastic is an oil-based product. So is any of our high tech clothing, but at least that lasts more than five minutes to chug down filtered high price tap water.

So i've written before about the need to stay hydrated - drink three or four bottle fulls a day - don't rely on taste. Most of us go around sleep deprived and dehydrated. No need for at least one of them: fill the bottle, empty the bottle. But staying hydrated by buying bottled water is worse than taking the elevator down four flights.

In other words, what's the cost of all these disposable bottles? the cost of raw materials, of transporting them, of energy to convert the materials into bottles, to fill with filtered water, the cost of those same basic materials, refined differently to transport these heavy little capsules, the energy cost of storing them "cold" and dumping them out from a dispenser. What's the problem? when did we get so paranoid about tap water? when coke started bottling it? EU has some of the highest international standards for tap water anywhere. Even on what a person pays for a bottle (you pay 1000x's more for it than tap water which isn't even metered in homes in the UK).

And as for the water from the spings argument? First, most bottled water is just filtered water (reverse osmosis) from the tap. Second, where it is shipped from Evian or Malvern or anywhere else, the same questions about costs of components apply, and so what? do you care when you're getting onto a train where that bottle comes from or is it that there's buy one get one free; only 20p with a copy of the Independent.

This may be the new "drink responsibly" - ban the frickin' bottle - the bottled water bottle that is.

Drinking responsibly is an easy and cheap way to feel good about yourself:
at work get a stainless steel water bottle. For travel or the gym where you may want to protect your teeth, you may need to get a long lasting polycarbonate, but you can look for a recyclable type there. Here's some info on these types. Keep the bottle at work and use the installed filtered taps available in most kitchens/kitchenettes, or keep the bottle in your pack. Empty it weighs almost nothing; full, not much more. On campus there's no excuse not to skip the landfill, is there?

The message is still the same: hydrate or die, but at least we can do either without leaving such a big energy hole in our wake.

Happy Hydrating.

update march4, 2008:
if you do a google search on banning bottled water you'll see an increasing number of hits on both cities and groups that are getting behind questioning the cost of bottled water. So, you ain't alone.

Posted by at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let me say upfront that i am a lapsed vegetarian: i am a meat opportunist. If the choice is between me and starvation - or me and no protein source at all - i'll eat that asphyxiated, air-bolted, or otherwise slaughtered creature. I will try to excuse myself by limiting my intake to grass fed cattle, free range, cage free birds and line caught fish.

Just wanted to get that on the table before offering the following for your meat-eating consideration: as if meat production wasn't costly enough, EU cows are contributing to the destruction of the rain forest. Once again when it comes to deforestation at a distanceand the forcible removal of people from their homes, fast food outlets in the EU are at the head of the cue. THis time, it's not because they're selling Amazonian Beef, but because the food the cattle eat is based on soybeans grown where people and old growth forests used to be:

(quote)Fast-food outlets throughout Europe, including McDonald’s, rely heavily on Brazilian soybeans, which are increasingly harvested from fields that used to be Amazon rainforest. The European Union bought 10 million tons of soy from Brazil in 2006 — about 40 percent of Brazil’s soy export crop — soy that is used as animal feed to fatten the cows and chickens that become Big Macs and McNuggets. (Nearly 80 percent of the global soybean harvest is milled into animal feed, according to the Worldwatch Institute.)(end of quote)

If you care about why getting rid of old growth sources of our planet's ecosystems, and CO2 cleansing planetary lungs, is an issue; if you care about the environmental impact of Big Meat; if the costs of production socially, economically and globally of Meat are of interest, then you now have one more question to ask at the grocery store if you purchase EU-based meat products: what did those poor suckers eat before they ended up on the chop?

Technorati Tags: environment, health, meat

It seems an awful lot of them have been eating GM'd AND non-GM'd soybeans alike grown where once old growth brazilian rain forest existed. This state of affairs is problematic for a number of reasons, but one of them at least is that the cost of that burger, stake or sausage may be significantly higher and have more global consequences than that with which a reasonable person may reasonably be expected to cope.

And yet we have so much choice in our affluence as a nation: once we're informed about problems, we have a capacity to chose. Less meat, less meat frequency; and if it is consumed, get local. Local raised, transported and now, FED with LOCALLY grown FEED. One might smile knowingly and say Ah but in the UK major grocery merchants have cut out GM feed from their products. Uh huh, we'll leave the current issue du gare of contamination between gmo and non-gmo crops aside for the moment. That still leaves soybeans that aren't GM'd - and where do they come from? Brazil. Who's the biggest importer of brazilian soybeans for livestock feed? the EU.

Once upon a time, McDonalds was chided because it was supposedly buying beef from cattle grazed on what was once old growth brazilian rain forest. As recently as 2005, the EU was importing this beef out of fear of mad cow disease. Market forces. Those forces turned ugly, turning the poorer people on that land (aka "peasants") off it by force so it could be given over to the more cost-effective cattle. When a nun was killed protesting these actions, public sentiment started to turn against government sanctioned practice. The obligatory "conservation" areas were set up.

It's tragically ironic that while EU beef products are largely back on the table, what feeds them is still more of the rainforest: soybeans grown on oldgrowth land. The UK is part of the EU, and UK cattle do chow down on non-GMO brazilian rain forest soybeans.

Large international feed companies like Carghill are now involved in efforts to work with Brazilian farmers and government on rainforest reforestation projects as many illegal soybean farms turn "legal" - and companies like cargill (though they aren't the only companies in the region) are buying less soy from the region because it is not in compliance with new "Forest friendly" regulations about soy production.

The question UK consumers - like you reading this - can start asking when going up to the butcher's shelf in the grocery is "what's the source of feed for the chickens here? for the cows?" and if they say soybeans, "are the sources certified as "forest friendly"

Now if you're a meat eater, you may want to ask yourself how great an idea is even forest friendly soybean feed? First there's the questionable practice of "reforestation" - i admit i haven't investigated what that means in the Amazon, but back home in canada, it meant monoculture: planting a single type of tree in straight rows in order to be harvested later again. That's not a forest; that's a farm.

Second, let's look at the cost of shipping that feed in for EU cattle. Food is grown in one country half way around the world; that heavy produce is then put into various transports and shipped non-stop across the planet to feed EU livestock (livestock. what a word). Transportation costs alone in terms of fuel are non-trivial. Add that to the energy cost of raising animals for food, and ya have to ask what fast food joints are doing to the food to make it profitable.

and THIRD - what is perhaps the most ironic point - may be in the following basic question (maybe it's not basic if you haven't spent any of your life around a farm or farm animals) Why does food need to be shipped in for cattle in the first place? if there's not enough room to graze the cattle, where are the cattle being kept? In little boxes? YES. Standing still in stalls. And that's OK? How artificial is that?

ALL this - ALL this grief death and destruction (no exaggeration that, eh?) for what? the fast food burger or nugget we grab and consume without thinking (and then feel like crap five minutes later); the cheap cut of meat whose source or provenance is not posted or queried? and this is good? this is something educated persons can rationalize as fine, if not good?

And before anyone pulls out "but i'm a student; i can only afford the cheap meat" there are alternatives, including "eat less; eat local" That also means avoiding the fast food lunch with chicken or meat from unknown sources. Go ahead: next time you pop into your fave food shop, ask where they get their chicken or beef.

That is, if we want to keep eating meat, we can eat less of it. That's the advice of economist Rajendra Pachauri offers in an arrgument that explains how this action alone will have significant benefits for the environment, too.

And when we do eat mean, we can ensure its local, its pastures are local - that it has pastures, and that it has some level of care that we would take pride in being scrutinized by the world (growing no. of uk examples, like "happy meats" (!)). If we start seeing meat as the high cost luxury good it is, we might value it a bit more, too.

Or we can just stop eating meat.

Lots of choices. One step at a time.

Posted by at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)