Are you paying 5$ a gallon?

You probably are...you just don't know it yet. Am I talking about milk, not quite. (That'll happen when the mad cow scare takes effect.) How about gasoline? Despite ever climbing prices, that time has not yet come either.(At least not in my neck of the woods.) The substance under discussion today is....are youready for this? Water!! Wait a second...water? Water? Damn right, water. If you drink it out of a bottle more than you drink it out of a tap, you are paying between 3 to 5 dollars a gallon. For water. REALLY. Of course, the average price of water coming out of your tap? $.23 a gallon. Twenty-three cents vs. five bucks? Somebody is making a tidy profit here and it sure as heck ain't me. But hey, we all drink bottled water for a reason, right? Let's look at that.

Some time ago, during America's "lets scare ourselves to death" phase, we decided that the ground water was becoming more polluted every day. Chemical companies and commercial farmers would cause us all to have cancer by the age of 30. Back then, bottled water was pretty much a European thing. Perrier and Evian (naive in reverse) represented the bulk of the market and globe-trotting Hollyweird types brought it back to the U.S. as a symbol of wealth and arrogance. Before long, a market developed and the stuff was being sold all over the place. Fast forward to 2006...over 600 brands of bottled water exist worldwide. It outsells soda. Now, if you've ever traveled through Europe, you'd know why they came up with bottled water in the first place. Their water distribution systems are ancient, the plants are a mess and standards non-existent. They needed bottled water. Here in the U.S., most households have reasonably decent enough drinking water. It may not taste great and it may be full of minerals, but it won't kill us. I remember as a child drinking water straight from the garden hose. On a hot summers day, it was like pure elixir. Kids these days would probably choke at the thought as they clutch their sports bottles. Now, the water where I live is so full of minerals I have to literally wash the car with one hand and dry it with the other. If I don't, it'll be ugly and cloudy when it dries. Still, if the water is cold enough, I'll drink it straight from the tap. I also have a refridgerator with water in the door and a filter in the back. Even better. It's only $50 per filter and it lasts several months. Certainly cheaper than bottled. But wait, you say...bottled IS better. Or is it?

To avoid potential lawsuits, i'll simply say this. Current FDA standards allow for bottled water companies to fill their bottles from a city tap. Any tap. Use your imagination.

One of the conveniences we arrogant Americans take for granted is that when we turn on the tap, water will come out. Around the world and even in some places here, there are about 1.5 billion people who don't enjoy that privilege. A FRACTION of the money spent on bottled water around the world would solve that problem. Maybe those 600 companies could set aside .05 a bottle for a few months. That is about all it would take. Spend a little profit so people who don't have running water and can't afford bottled water can get a tap in their village. It's the least they can do. It's the least WE could do. There are quite a few organizations dedicated to this cause. They deserve a few of your dollars.

Side Note: Attention enviromentalists! When you are done quoting gas mileage rates for SUVs vs your lil' hybrid and have completed your demonstration against wind farms for the sake of the birds, crunch these here numbers. It annually takes 1.5 BILLION barrels of oil to make the plastic bottles that water comes in. Collectively, we place some 2.5 MILLION plastic bottles per HOUR into our landfills. As they break down, they release toxic run-off that leeches out and causes the landfills to be shut down. At this point, we are closing landfills almost as fast as we open new ones. Just think...somewhere in this world a billion people are going thirsty for want of that problem.

A few final thoughts, if you please. When I lived in the Kingdom of Bahrain in the Arabian gulf, I could buy a 2 liter bottle of water for about fifty cents. The water was manufactured in a reverse osmosis plant and the bottles were all recyclable. This seemed pretty reasonable. I drank it because the water that came out of the taps was barely tolerable for a shower, much less consumption. We had big bottled water in our flat that was delivered for about $1.90 per 5 gallon jug. That was for cooking, drinking and making ice. Damn reasonable. And now for the other end of the scale. The hottest new thing to have in ones hand in Hollyweird is a bottle of "Bling H20." At around $34 dollars per LITER that's a pretty bold statement. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I still think i'd drink out of the hose on a hot summers day. The nostalgia it brings is priceless.