Drinking Bottled Water Makes You Lazy; plus Nalgene

Fast Company's Charles Fishman just destroyed bottled water for me, and I'm glad he did.

He visits Fiji, Maine, and the souls all of us of who have supported the marketing juggernaut of bottled water into a$38B bottle, $16B a year industry, framing the environmentally unfriendliness of our little luxury habit with so many damning soundbites that I can't even summarize, but here's a thought that stuck with me. Most cities in America have perfectly safe tap water- San Francisco's comes from Yosemite and doesn't even need to be filtered!- yet we truck 1 BILLION bottles around weekly, requiring 37,800 18-wheelers (since water, and all the plastic spent in containing it one time, is so heavy that a carrier has to be partially empty). It's not the money, although if we paid for home water what we paid for bottled, our monthly bill would be $9,000. It's that on top of all the this waste, while we trendify the next cool label that we don't need it (the other top-consuming nations, Mexico, etc., do), 1B people worldwide don't have any clean water at all- including half the people on Fiji.

Nalgene gets our nod as an Optimist Company, just because of the stark logical contrast an empty water container makes, and because, as far as I can tell, Nalgene has done the best job of branding, making cool, an empty bottle.

Drinking bottled water doesn't make you lazy, although I think spreading an untrendy rumor about it might help age the trend and get more people toting around reusable bottles. (Guess what! Drinking bottled water makes you smell bad!) I already had some notion that I was lazy by drinking a bottle or two of Smart Water every day, especially as my 20,000+ person employer de-emphasized its free bottled water, gave out free reusable bottles and installed filter machines in our kitchenettes.

But now I REALLY feel lazy, so I'm going to take a crumby old plastic cup with me today, be seen everywhere with it, and make some noise about it.