Evian spelled backwards is Naive

The rural Australian town of Bundanoon has banned the sale of bottled water — and it’s possibly the first town in the whole world to ever do so.

And they may not be the last as more and more people are beginning to recognize that bottled water is not only a scam, it’s bad for the environment as well. Producing and trucking clean water, in single-serving containers, requires a lot of energy, and landfills are getting filled with empty water bottles.

Over the past few years, at least 60 cities in the United States and a handful of others in Canada and the United Kingdom have agreed to stop spending taxpayer dollars on bottled water, which is often consumed during city meetings, said Deborah Lapidus, organizer of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in the U.S.

But the Boston-based nonprofit corporate watchdog has never heard of a community banning the sale of bottled water, she said.
“I think what this town is doing is taking it one step further and recognizing that there’s safe drinking water coming out of our taps,” she said.

Bundanoon’s battle against the bottle has been brewing for years, ever since a Sydney-based beverage company announced plans to build a water extraction plant in the town. Residents were furious over the prospect of an outsider taking their water, trucking it up to Sydney for processing and then selling it back to them. The town is still fighting the company’s proposal in court.

Then in March, Huw Kingston, who owns the town’s combination cafe and bike shop, had a thought: If the town was so against hosting a water bottling company, why not ban the end product?

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The measure will not impose penalties on those who don’t comply when it goes into effect in September. Still, all the business owners voluntarily agreed to follow it, recognizing the financial and environmental drawbacks of bottled water, Kingston said.

On Wednesday, 356 people turned up for a vote — the biggest turnout ever at a town meeting.

Only two people voted no. One said he was worried banning bottled water would encourage people to drink sugary beverages. The other was Geoff Parker, director of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute — which represents the bottled water industry.

Now, living in Florida, which is one of the few places on Earth where drinking bottled water makes some sense because the tap water tastes really terrible due to the large amounts of lime and chlorine in it, I am somewhat torn as I recognize that bottled water is a rip-off and a waste of environmental resources, but also that the tap water here, while perfectly clean and safe, tastes nasty.

But, since there are many options for improving the taste of Florida tap water — such as pitchers and taps with water filters, and refrigerators with built-in water filtration systems — there’s still little to no justification for folks to pay for a bottle of water as they would a bottle of soda or juice, and then to discard it into the trash where it will sit, perhaps for centuries, in a landfill with millions — maybe even billions — of other little plastic bottles.