Sustainability is now the biggest topic in the bottled water online conversation | Hacker News Reader

Sustainability is now the biggest topic in the bottled water online conversation

pulsarplatform.com

Easy problem to fix. $0.50 tax on any bottle smaller than 64oz.

Bottled water is the dumbest product category ever. Use tap water. If the tap water sucks, you need big bottles of water, so get them.

What happens if that causes glass to become more economical? Glass is worse for climate change, partly because of the higher fuel use in transporting it's heavier weight.

This is the trouble with plastic - it's not simple! You can try to force a solution to one problem but exacerbate another one. And of course there are economic costs which I guess would affect poor people the most and push the wealth inequality problem along a little further. How much cost is worth paying? Not infinite. We have to find a balance somewhere but if you never even considered the trade-offs, you're not going to find that balance at all.

I didn’t use the word plastic. The more fundamental problem in my opinion is single serving water - it’s dumb and wasteful.

Shipping water is bad for climate change. The fud about glass and global warming is overstated — the big problem with glass is spoilage. The world would be better off with tap water in places that it is practical and filters for everyone else. The fact that it makes economic sense to import water from Fiji to Boston for about the same retail price as Poland Spring (trucked <200 miles) tells me that the economic problems are pretty easy to fix.

Economics are a big part of solving any problem, but you need regulatory frameworks as well, and those frameworks will hurt incumbent companies. All packaged drinks are trading a commodity based in the utility it delivers at a point in time. A 20oz cold coke is 5-10x the cost of a fountain or 3 liter bottle. There’s no incentive to reduce package waste as the profit center for coke (or any other soda company) is a big, cold single serving.

OK, bottled water of any sort is a different issue. I don't use it much myself but could it just be a generational thing? Old people carried their own water bottle so they don't see the point. Young people may be accustomed to the convenience.

> If the tap water sucks, you need big bottles of water

or just get better tap water.

worse case scenario you pour the bottled water into the pipe system at a central location and save the transport cost.

The infrastructure for that isn’t really financially feasible in rural areas. It also means you’re using potable water for things like bathing even when the well water is good enough for bathing but not drinking.

Would that tax apply to all soft drinks, or only still water?

Depends on the goal and the politics.

It’s a great category to tax as its voluntary and the value of the product varies dramatically by context. A 32 oz fountain Coke at McDonalds is $1, a 20 oz cold bottle at CVS is $2.50 and $7.50 at Yankee Stadium. The tax just moves the demand curve.

OK, here's a scenario.

You're hosting an event. You want to provide the attendees (~2000 people) with water. Do you provide large water carafes with spigots, and disposable (4-10oz) cups? Or do you provide (20-30oz) water bottles?

In my experience, people (especially college students, since that's the demographic I'm used to working with) are much more likely to hold onto a water bottle until they finish all 20oz or so, but grab a cup, fill it, drain it, and throw it away...then go back 20 minutes later and repeat the process.

> but grab a cup, fill it, drain it, and throw it away...then go back 20 minutes later and repeat the process.

They don't perceive cups to be as wasteful as plastic bottles? Are these plastic or paper cups? Pure paper cups would be acceptable because they degrade faster.

Humans consumed water for millennia during events without plastic water bottles.

I’ve hosted many events where I’ve provided beer and wine. Everything from solo cup keggers to weddings. Nobody got a individual bottle or can, and everyone managed to muddle through.

In my scenario, you can:

- Pay the tax.

- Provide a disposable cup.

- Provide a non-disposable cup.

- BYO cup.

Other possibilities exist as well.

There's such an elegant solution here: cups could have individually tailored patterns (or chosen from a large library of a few 100s) on the outside s.t. you wouldn't confuse yours for another. We're (at least I am) pretty good at memorizing combinations of odd shapes and colors, so there's no need to name cups (i.e. they can be pre-named).

People might be talking about it a lot but it's a pretty low quality conversation. The extent of the knowledge among them seems to be mostly "plastic = bad, recycling = good". I've asked people for deeper reasoning behind their opinions and they have trouble expressing anything except some shock news story about dead fish or the idea that we need to save our oil for future generations' plastic needs - Those naughty future people! Though some are happy to burn plastic rubbish because their concern is more with the dead fish than climate change or waste of oil. Some are happy to eat fish because overfishing isn't as bad as plastic despite it being an actual, but out of fashion, problem.

Simple solution: change the bottle to be much taller, make it out of copper, and then add a second hole to fill it. Nice and sustainable.

Seriously though bottled water is great when you need it, like when you're on a cross country road trip or in a disaster zone. But using makeshift methods for every day routines, especially when there is already infrastructure to accomplish the same thing, is inherently antisustainable.

I guess there is little moral difference between Water Mafia that is supplying water in tankers in developed world and water mafia that is supplying overpriced water in bottles to citizens of First World.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKmwbXc1rmY

the difference is people in the first world willingly reject perfectly potable water coming in pipe for plastic-bottled water. While in poor countries, some don't have access to pipe water and tanker water is far better than well water.

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