The bottling industry has always been one that amazed me. As a child for instance, I could get Coke and other drinks in glorious glass bottles, and which after I drunk them I could get 1/2p back on them - which encouraged me to drink more!
No say's the drink industry, that's not safe or efficient (Hmm - so all those empty lorries going back to the depot is "efficient"?), and some nasty people were using them to attack people which we got sued for - so we need to replace them with (unrecyclable) PTFE plastic.
OK, so let the customer have an inferior experience, reduce customer loyalty, and let the council worry over how to dispose of four out of five of the PTFE bottles, which take 1000years to degrade.
The Mayors office of New York City has started a campaign, encouraging citizens to be environmentally friendly and dump the bottled water for tap water. Why? Because some of it comes from half way around the world, the distribution lorries create congestion, and bottles create landfill waste. Restaurants in California have separately started to use tap-water as their standard product, unless you ask for the bottled version.
But the Bottled Water Association says it is unfair to single out an industry that is promoting recycling and introducing biodegradable packaging. Yeah, yeah, yeah - talk to the hand buddy!
Note - if you have one of those office water dispensers in your office, supplied by a nice lorry, think about this. If you swapped that for a tap-feed dispenser supplied via a micro-bore system, it would take around 4months for the costs of initial outlay to be repaid and for you to start saving money - at between a 50% and 70% level. On the other hand, you could keep clogging up the environment, and instead of drinking water that's fresh from a tap and fully filtered; drink stuff that on average is four months old instead, and biodegrades in that nice container in the top due to sunlight: Yum!
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