While reading the article Banishing Bottles and Bringing on Bags (News, Sept. 4), I began to think even bigger. Imagine if bringing drinking water to our lips carried no environmental impact at all!
Bags may be greener in some ways than bottles, but they are disposable, have to be manufactured using natural resources and energy, and they still have to be hauled around on trucks. The corn used to make the bags consumes fuel, pesticides, and fertilizers. And then there is the issue of using agricultural land to produce non-food items.
Even if bags are a net improvement, they are still very high impact, and there is still the problem of the little 500ml bottles that use up our resources and fill our landfills. The cost of bottled water is really quite astounding; often it exceeds that of gasoline. Other than some obscene profits, this cost is proportional to the environmental impact it carries.
So if green is our goal, let’s really dream! Here is my dream. Drinking water is something that everyone needs, so why don’t we build a system of pipes that delivers water to every household?
Matt Schenck
Whitehorse