Sunday, April 01, 2007

Water Bottles

I want to share with my classmates my Royte reading response for the chapter Satan's Resin. I just found that this chapter really hit home with me and perhaps it will for you, too?

In 2003, Americans consumed 13 billion liters of bottled water! Unfortunately, I know that I am part of this statistic. Several months ago, I wrote a list of things I could live without to save money. Bottled water was one of them. Every week I was spending close to $6.00 on bottled water. Roughly that would total close to $290.00 annually. Seeing these figures down on paper really put things in perspective for me. Why did I actually drink bottled water?

For me, I grew up on it. Truthfully, I have never been very concerned about the impurities in our water. However, spending close to $300.00 a year on drinking water was a bit ridiculous. There was one substitute that I could think of and that was buying a Brita water filter. So I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and found a pitcher that would fit very nicely inside my refrigerator. Along with that I bought a filter that would need to be changed every 3 months for $19.00. Being a bargain shopper this seemed very logical to me to stop buying bottles of water. If I kept using this pitcher of water, I could save close to $200.00! Honestly, at the time I was only concerned with the money issue. However, this chapter put light on the fact that I am not contributing to the astounding statistic anymore. No longer are my water bottles being burned or buried.

At the end of the day, it’s comforting knowing that I have helped save our environment and quite frankly, I didn’t even go out of way to do it. This just seems like something that everyone would be capable of doing.

2 comments:

Michelle said...

Amanda,

Your post nicely highlights the fact that we must consider both the environmental and economic factors in our purchasing decisions.

This is not an "either/or" issue. Instead, it's a two-fold issue that we need to think about.

Well done!
:0)
M

Anonymous said...

That's great! This chapter was particularly disturbing to me too. I used to use the Brita water filter too and it works great! However, it didn't quite fit my needs once I had a family so at my house we use the Pur filter that actually attaches right onto your faucet at home. I think it works great because you can choose to have filtered water or not and you don't have to change it that often.