It sounds like you do understand the focus on the bottle that's easily replaced by opening a tap or using the water fountain that's found in most public places.
Likewise there's a lot of focus on replacing light bulbs with energy efficient alternatives, and less focus on replacing electric space heaters because light bulbs are easily replaced with little impact on the user (and indeed, save money over the long run) and are more common than electric space heaters.
People should know that they are going to get thirsty at some point.
Also, using cans instead of bottles isn't exactly a major shift in most people's life. It's infinitely recyclable (unlike plastic), something nature knows how to deal with (unlike plastic) and often better for the beverage (in the case of beer at the very least).
That's not really a city planning issue, it's just the way things are in hyper-urban areas.
I hope so much that I can pull off a remote job in the next year or so -- believe me, I'd rather never drive if I could.
If you read further down this thread, many commenters in this thread are convinced that we should never package water.
Packaged water is useful when stockpiling for or responding to natural disasters (hurricanes, wildfire, tornadoes, earthquakes), emergency evacuation camps, places where safe, clean water and filters aren't easily accessible or used. Everywhere else, it's really unnecessary.
Carrying a water bottle with you everywhere you go is another option, but probably not strictly necessary unless you're currently trying to pass a kidney stone.
Whereas snobbery works great. The successful (advertising) campaigns target the cool kids (opinion leaders).
However, from that perspective is obvious that "littering, disposable bags" isn't even in the same ballpark. IMHO it would be counterproductive to motivate people with such goals, since if the end result is that they stop littering, switch to reusable bags and think "yeah, now I've done my part"... it's wrong, they're still contributing about 99% of the damage that they used to do, it's nowhere close to sufficient. Right now (unlike, say, the 1980s) the minimal amount of change is very, very large - currently, achieving our objectives for the environment requires changes that would be considered radical by pretty much everyone, and political capital that no current leader has.
Raise the gas price by a few percent, and you get rioting in the streets. Would anyone have enough political capital to double the gas price, so that people actually burn significantly less oil? And would the transport reduction achieved by merely doubling the gas price be sufficient to reduce the emissions? IMHO the answer to both these answers is a clear NO, the minimal amount of change needed is larger than the maximal amount of change for which we have political capital.
Even the fuel tax, while the goal is to drive change, you can drive change by rewarding the desired behaviour (e.g. a revenue-neutral gas/carbon tax that paid back to low income folks), rather than punishing people. Maybe not as drastic a change since you don't get people not driving because they can't afford it, but it would incentivize doing something else to the same extent.
Or we could be much more aggressive about moving people to electric cars. Or we could simply invest more money/energy into making public transport better.
We could say try and convince people to fly less, or we could legislate carbon offsets for air travel.
So while, yes, serious change is needed, I think we really need to think about this from a political angle, rather than a moralising angle.
I would avoid even touching the diet angle if you want people to listen to you and not write you off. Meat does contribute noticeably to global warming, but food is culture, it is the hardest change to achieve, so we should really leave it to last, politically. It would be far better to deal with meat in an overall carbon tax solution, rather than singling it out as a thing people have to change.
We used to just use public drinking fountains. Or paper cups at the office water cooler. And kids drank out of water fountains in parks, or out of random garden hoses they found.
Yesterday I saw a kid with a fancy Nalgene... at church!
I have a pill that I take which has dry cough as a side-effect, and even I don't bring a water bottle to church. The kid's not going to shrivel up and blow away because he can't have a sip of water for 45 minutes.
I'm carrying a backpack anyway and this is a really small amount of things to bring around. It's a very small impact from a single person, but every few times someone will say "ooh, that's a good idea" or something like that and it makes me feel like the idea is spreading.
I have a set of relatives that have a garage full of cartons of bottled water (there was a sale). Their tap water is of excellent quality.
It doesn't help that our solution to dirty water (plastic bottles) is making even clean water unusable (microplastic).
Compared to bottles, it has the added advantage of being really inexpensive. So much so that, when places like gas stations and convenience stores sell the same beverage in both fountain and bottled forms, the fountain version is typically sold at a steep discount relative to the bottled one.
I suspect "natural" products like fruit juice necessarily suffer from being made into concentrates and reconstituted on demand. I'm not sure why it should be this way with soda, but in my experience soda from a bottle always tastes way better than from a fountain.
As someone who prefers fountain soda and avoids bottle sodas due to taste (i believe it is level of carbonation), this is highly subjective and I urge you to look beyond your personal tastes (heh) on this subject.
I don't think all of that really matters anyway, because the point I'm making is: anything that's bad about a plastic bottle filled with water surely must be just as bad for a plastic bottle filled with water and a little bit of sugar and coloring. Nobody has really addressed this, and I just think it's strange.
I'm fine with the idea that we should address this by drinking tap water instead of bottled water. All I'm saying is that surely the same goes for other bottled drinks as well.
I suspect people drink far more bottles of water than soda, simply based on the price of an entire flat of water compared to a 6-pack of 20 ounce sodas.