Water Follies

A favorite drink of the more-environmental-than-thou club (and others who just think it's cool) is Fiji bottled water.

Surprisingly enough, this water actually comes from Fiji--but not easily.

Not only is Fiji an 18-hour plane ride and a four-hour truck trip away, but before it hits our grocery store shelves, it has to make that trip twice because the bottles are not made in Fiji.

This is just a small example of the tantalizing and amusing tidbits in this Fast Company article about the bottled-water industry and the people who support it.

It you are an environmentalist or you know someone who you would like to needle with tales of the huge carbon footprint their precious wa-wa is leaving on its way to their mouths, you have got to read this article.

If you are interested in how Americans came to pay so much money for something that is available for nada, you might be interested in this too. Here is my favorite part:

"You can buy a half-liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.

"In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000."

If you are interested in "the way things work" this might prove to be an interesting read.