What is the debate about bottled water?
Why does it matter and how does it affect us?
Some Pro arguments:
Economy
- Portable
- Low barriers to entry
- Distributed resource and power to an essential resource
- Circular economy
- Safer in developing countries
Environment
- Quantification – solid understanding of water consumed (e.g. 15 litres to survive)
- Distribution – bottled and shipped to places where they are needed
- Verification – verified to be considered drinkable in cases where clean water is an issue
Pro Ethics
- Easily accessible
- General safety standard
- Reduce waste – keeping bottle
- Could be recycled for other uses such as oil
Economy
- Powered by fossil fuels
- Much shipping and adding externalities and creating waste
- Culminated health burden and leakage in bottled waters
- impact on health care
- black market in bottled water possible creation of disease
- Ecosystem cost
- Households could also develop opportunity cost
Environment
- Plastics
- Creating demand of water that is a public good;
- Increasing use of plastics;
- Shortening short life of waters
If tap water costs about the same as bottled water then isn’t there a point of potentially not needing to drink bottled water?
Is this about perception?
Does this debate not premise on where we live and what resources we have?
If we took a bird’s eye view, is this not about a larger question?
About energy?
Bottled water is complex isn’t it?
There are external factors of the environment, health, ethics and politics.
Is there a platform to discuss this globally?
As the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals on clean access water – these are questions that we as consumers and stakeholders ought to start thinking about.
As a good friend of mine would say ‘Water is like Gold.’
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