Small Streams

Peter Leo v. Bottled Water

Esteemed Post-Gazette columnist, writing coach, and all-around genial guy Peter Leo gets a bee in his bonnet about bottled water. I really haven't read a scathing Peter Leo column, but this one is close as they come.

Water is heavy. Moving large quantities of it, for example, 8,000 miles from Fiji to New York, requires burning massive quantities of fossil fuels that emit pollutants. Tap water, by contrast, is distributed through an energy efficient infrastructure. A British study calculated that transporting bottled water in the U.K. generated carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to the annual energy consumption of 6,000 homes.

Peter Leo usually likes to poke fun, but in this article there's a kind of enough-is-enough feel to his essay that you not only want to stop buying bottled water, you want to start snatching it from other people's hands, and making sure to replace it with a cool glass of regular.

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Posted by mastr at July 25, 2006 08:46 AM