This just hurts to read...
It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact many of the branded bottles of water are not spring water but bottled tap water.
It is almost as bad as the somewhat inexplicable growth in bottled water in places where tap water is perfectly acceptable. In fact many of the branded bottles of water are not spring water but bottled tap water.
I find people buying $200 sneakers that offer no significant performance improvement over much cheaper alternatives to be 'inexplicable.' I find people buying $1000 phones when a $200 phone would perform literally 100% of a purchaser's tasks to 100% acceptability, to be 'inexplicable'. I even find people buying new cars 'inexplicable' given their hyper-depreciation - meaning a lightly used car is generally a vastly better value.
Of course I put 'inexplicable' in single quotes because these things are all completely explicable. Personal choice is a right of every person in a free society, and people have different views and values. And my examples understate the relevance of this as this choice is far more significant, and frequently personal, when it comes to what people consume than whatever stuff people buy for image crafting.
But we don't. Rather, we make the price of engaging in that activity extremely high. What would be closest to what you are advocating would be something like summary execution for all cases of homicide and rape, and no civilized country does that.
While I know that laptop and desktop systems have reached the point where pretty much anything will serve -- my laptop is over five years old and works for what I need -- I haven't found that phones have topped out yet. There is a massive array of features, including durability and battery life, where there is at least some potential to get more by paying more, and where I might actually use that.
I could possibly learn more by reading reviews and trying to read in between the lines, but as somebody who tries to upgrade rarely, I was content to pay more and hope that I'm actually getting what I need. And then try not to do it again for several years.
I fully admit to ignorance -- and that's your answer. I don't work with many cell phones; mostly, just mine. So you might well be able to recommend me an acceptable $200 substitute. But I bet somebody here would disagree, and I wouldn't know who to believe.
That's my experience. I can't tell you if it generalizes. (I can say that I waited until I got it for half price, which removes some of the sting.)
As a kid, here in the UK, most schools, public buildings and towns (in the street) had drinking fountains. Most town centres, shopping areas, tourist spots etc had them. Quite often they had a way to fill a bottle too. In the eighties they died out, and you'll rarely to never see one today. Why? They certainly weren't unsafe.
Bottled water producers seem to have managed to put people off our overwhelmingly safe tap water and drinking fountains. Now tap is seen as second rate somehow. Put in a vending machine instead, etc. Drinking fountains in schools and streets are long gone.
So now everyone can buy a Coke or bottled water, complete with single use plastic, and we mistakenly call that progress. The same people seem fine using tap water for tea, ice, juice etc.
Yet another bit of progress that baffles me. :)
I remember in the 80’s when travelling to Europe, whether you could drink the tap water was always a question to ask at the start of the holiday. 30 years later, we are now questioning our own tap water even though the rest of the EU and America have caught up, with water quality that is on par with anything that could be purchased in a bottle.
Tap water and bottled water in Utrecht are pumped from EXACTLY the same source. :)
Bottled water was found to contain microplastics.
people don’t spend their money and carry huge loads of water bottles if they can have the equivalent for « free » at home. If they do it’s because the tap water infrastructure (as a whole, up to the kitchen’s tap) alter the taste and quality of the water badly enough, even in the cases where the original source is of comparable quality.
It's marketing that drives the preference. That's why most chronic bottled water drinkers I know surround their life with other bullshit irrelevant products. It's the same mechanics
That said, I think plastic can be OK if it is trashed adequately. I don't think my plastic bottles end up in the oceans.
Are you saying that 5 minute task every few years is more work then manually lugging 10,000 gallons of water through say, 10,000 separate containers, carrying each one, opening them manually each time, tipping and pouring them, then discarding them? (that's the weight of about 25 cars)
Not to be rude but I don't believe you.
As it stands, I have trouble to descale the washing machine every six months.
I know that the simple table based filters (a can with a filter to filter 1 liter of water) are often not exchanged frequently enough.
Why introduce that risk unnecessarily?
Every filtration system I have owned needs to have the cartridges replaced every six months. What system has multi-year cartridges?
What other-worldly solution do you think the bottling companies are using?
$25'000 is more than you need in several lifetimes.
But then again, tab water here is excellent and also cool. So I don't see a reason why I should transport bottled water. It is much more convenient and cheaper.
The standard kirkland bottled water you see in the US in the standard 80 unit packs would run you $195,000 for that.
Municipal water would be about $1,500 for that + $150 filter.
It's a 99.2% cheaper option. Oh right and the 1.6 million water bottles you'd not have produced, right.
Many people drinking bottled water aren't drinking the cheapest in the supermarket - the recycling bin outside my flat is regularly filled with 1.5l evian bottles - they're £1 each in the local shop. At one bottle a day, that's ~35 person-years. Not common, but not insane.
However, my office has 17 people on my floor. If everyone here drank one bottle of it a day, we'd hit it in 2 years.
Even given expensive name brand water, a $50 filter cartridge only lasts for six months. That's $3150 for the same period. $50 replacing $25,000 is not grounded in reality.
To be honest, the argument for bottled water (I incorrectly thought) was more due to the convenience factor rather the taste. Clearly there are other points to consider.
That's not it. People don't drink tap water because they don't believe it's safe.
People who don't drink tap water usually have no trouble drinking it after it's boiled.
And non carbonated bottled water tastes just like tap water and you couldn't tell the two apart if there were from taps and brands you are not familiar with.
I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example.
I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.
absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.
That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.
But tastes vary so much that you couldn't tell random tap from random bottled.
Point being that while some places do have awful tap water, a lot of people just drink bottled or filtered water because they see people drink bottled or filtered water and copy that without even stopping to consider if their tap water is good enough or not.
https://www.ecowatch.com/bottled-water-sources-tap-253751064...
You might also have to modify the chemical makeup of the tap water itself.
Personally, I drink tap, but that's mostly because someone won't hook up the fridge (and nobody else in the family likes ice, for some reason.)