Bottled water 'is immoral' | Hacker News Reader

Bottled water 'is immoral'

telegraph.co.uk

15 pointsgetp44 comments

"Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser"

Yeah, and I think that telling other people what to do with their lives in order to prevent the emission of miniscule amounts of CO2 should be as unfashionable as smoking too, but hell, what would I know?

I have a little theory about this. When one issue moves into the mainstream, the avant-garde of the self-righteous find a new issue to focus on. They need to, in order to preserve their identity of being distinct from (morally superior to) the masses. It's analogous to music hipsters who immediately discard a band when it becomes popular.

It's funny how "morality" is trendy.

- EDIT -

quotes around morality

It's not clear to me that conspicuous conservation has that much to do with morality.

Exactly. I think it has to do with identity: "I'm the kind of person who..." We seek ways to distinguish ourselves from other people because differences produce meaning, or at least a feeling of it. Constructing an identity to fortify one's ego is an intrinsically selfish activity (I mean "self-ish" literally, i.e. concerning self), which may be why the morality-based identities seem more often to be hypocritical.

By the way, "conspicuous conservation" is a great term! I hadn't heard that.

Which "brand" of self-identity is fashionable and acceptable matters, though. I'd rather be part of a society where "I"m the kind of person who conserves and thinks about morality" is fashionable than one where the dominant self-identity is, say, "I'm the kind of person who'd rather kill and die than take disrespect from anyone."

I just made up "conspicuous conservation" on the spot, although I doubt I'm the first to do so. In this case it seems almost obvious.

if you cause harm to others, and are aware that you do so, you act immorally.

Then "immorality" is so prevalent that calling something immoral is pointless.

you have to include the effects on yourself as well.so in the case of the bottled water you don't have to drink poissoned water instead of bottled water in order to act morally.

Everything we do impacts on others, tracking small and arbitrary infractions and calling that morality is a far greater wrong than a less CO2 efficient source of water. Just cap and trade already, I hate these taboo based social manipulations.

"cause harm to others" is such a loose phrase you could drive a bulldozer through it. It could encompass everything from flatulence to the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I'd tighten up that language a little bit if you are trying to make a point.

If there are externalities, they should be fixed. That is not telling other people what to do with their lives, it is telling them to not steal from others.

Not sure why the CO2 aspect doesn't get regulated through the prize of fuel, though.

Because the price of fuel doesn't account for the damage fuel consumptions costs in the long run.

We do very little to assess and monetize the environmental damage corporations cause, especially over the long term.

The problem to he here is that the price of bottled water doesn't (evidently) reflect the true cost.

Driving a hummer, drinking bottled water, eating a big steak, taking airplanes everywhere. No prob, just pay for it. The price of these activities should be high enough that everyone is just delighted when someone does it, because the amount paid back into the commons makes it a great deal for everyone else.

That would end the moralizing, which doesn't make much sense in the first place (and is truly a hopeless way to influence anyone other than the choir anyway)

On the other hand, I did think it was pretty silly the other day when I saw water from New Zealand for sale here in California. Loading water onto a ship to ship it across more water to sell in a place which already has plenty of water seems pretty wasteful.

But I said "silly", not "immoral".

> Loading water onto a ship to ship it across more water to sell in a place which already has plenty of water seems pretty wasteful.

Gee, I thought we were talking about California, for a second.

FTFA:

'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'

And?

How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?

Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals for consumption?

Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?

This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the choice of battles to fight seems goofy.

You know, the questions you're asking are valid. But one might well ask "When there are other sources of clean, potable water available, why is it necessary, or even desirable, to drink water imported all the way from Fiji." Is Fijian water qualitatively that much better than it justifies the relatively monumental effort of transporting it to Manhattan for consumption?

I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions.

"I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions."

Quite true. My main issue was with the scant detail in the article, which assumes the reader should simply accept the proclamation of harm.

Had the article focused more on the more important matter of taking responsibility for the extended consequences of one's actions it would be harder to be dismissed out of hand.

Better results may be gained by provoking some introspection than by taking the moral high ground and attempting to shame people into acting a certain way. Even if shame works, the behavior is less likely to stick around.

Well I'm going to do my part to save the environment. I'll cycle to work; thus eating more food and respiring less efficiently and producing more CO2. I'll also eat more healthily, get more greens in me and protein; thus producing more methane which is 25 times worse than CO2 emissions.

Also, for when I do need to drive, I'll switch to a hybrid. However, that requires a large amount of lead and acids that are extremely harmful to the environment and it also takes more energy to produce an hybrid car than is actually saved in the average use of the car.

I will personally help destroy the environment by doing EVERYTHING I've been told should SAVE IT. I fucking love irony!

Contrary to what I suspect was your intent, you aren't being clever. You're just reinforcing the point that every choice has consequences...some intended, some not. For instance, the net increase in CO2 from your "cycle to work" respiration would, I suspect, be less damaging than the total net consequences of building, maintaining and driving a car. It'd be cheaper, too. Eating more greens might well make you fart more, though that's less than certain, but it would surely be less than the methane produced by the beef cattle that less-healthy eaters consume so voluminously.

Perhaps with some expansion, your reply could have made a serious contribution. Instead, it comes off looking glib.

A doctor told me that if you don't have a water filter, you are the water filter. That being said, the difference between the quality of most municipal tap water and bottled water is marketing dollars. In some countries, it is a fact that you have to boil the water before drinking it. I was so nervous about avoiding sickness on my last trip to a Latin American country that I used bottled water (on my doctor's recommendation) to rinse out my toothbrush and avoided salad.

This reminds me of the people who shop at Whole Foods yet dont recycle and celebrities who drive hybrid cars yet live in 10k sq. ft. houses where the AC/heating bill is hundreds/month. Classic human paradox of how hard it is to do everything right and/or people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

Bottled water "is portable"

It's potable as well

Yah, as soon as I wrote it I wanted to start a brand "portable potable".

so are reusable water bottles that cost about as much as one bottle of water would have cost.

No, they don't cost nearly as much as a single bottle of water. I buy bottled water in bulk.

I also use a reusable plastic bottle. I don't have it with me all the time.

Bottled water is like SUVs and large homes for upper middle class people. People get irrationally pissed about them and ignore much more important things related to the environment, like single pane windows and other poor insulation. The difference between an SUV and a prius is small compared to the energy lost in a poorly insulated home in New England or Arizona.

[edit: don't forget to account for the energy of washing the reusable bottle. I've heard for a ceramic mug you need to use it 1000 times before it uses less energy than 1000 styrofoam cups]

What exactly causes the 600x CO2 increase from production of bottled water vs. tap water? Creating the plastic bottle?

Presumably driving it around in trucks?

Both, probably. Both plastic and the cost of shipping scale roughly with the cost of petroleum.

CO2 is irrelevant, even if production is switched to biodegradeable plant-based oils and shipping is done over short distance with a renewable energy source, people will still complain about bottled water.

They complained before global warming was even thought about, and they're just using fantasy CO2 statistics to bolster their claims. In fact, in some areas with low access to water, governments spend millions merely pumping water up elevations. I know where I live they have to do it, and we're only slightly up hill from the supplier. I wonder how much CO2 they're putting into the atmosphere by using vast quantities of power to pump water up a gradient, which is less efficient than merely moving it.

This is not some competition to show the wrongness of the other side. These are questions for action.

I'm having trouble seeing how one could design a pumping system so poor that it's cheaper to ship water via truck in miniature plastic bottles produced in industrial parks on average thousands of miles away. Even an Archimedes screw is close to optimal energy efficiency if you have a gear system.

Part of the problem is that our socialized, monopoly municipal water suppliers provide unhealthy, bad tasting water.

The United States has excellent drinking water, pretty much everywhere. Issues of taste are usually caused by old pipes on the "last mile" of the water's path. So, buy a Brita filter. That's a market that actually makes sense.

IMO Brita filtered water tastes worse than the water out of the tap. My parents bemoan unfiltered water, I'm the opposite. For the life of me I can't drink filtered water because I don't find it refreshing as it taste clinically sterile.

A bigger part of the problem is the placebo effect.

My water tastes good and given the small amount of residual chlorine, is unlikely to be unhealthy. That's in the UK; whereabout are you talking about?

If the taste of the water really bothers you, in the UK they sell large water jugs which fill through charcoal filters (Brita), which remove any chlorine taste and only needed changing monthly or so.

So what should one drink while driving long distances? Will they install water fountains at gas stations?

Well the way I look at this, we're paying for it right? Supply and demand, people.

Actually, the argument being made is that you're _not_ paying for it. The externalities -- degraded environment, pollution, economic damage, etc. -- are being passed on to the powerless in other countries, or to future generations. In economic jargon (or as much thereof as I remember from college) there are negative externalities which are unaccounted for in the current market price.

I believe one of the arguments being made is also that if those externalities _were_ incorporated into the price, bottled water would be much less appealing on the basis of cost.

Precisely. The 'correct' thing to do to strike a balance between freedom and preventing damage is to levy a tax to 'cancel out' the externality. If people really, really want their bottled water, they'll be free to buy it, but factored into that price will be the true costs.

That's the theory, anyway. Calculating those costs may not always be obvious.

Some related commentary

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_s...

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