Saturday, April 28, 2007

I think we knew this all along...

Bottled water makes no sense, just money.
"Bottled water is a classic example of the market ignoring the environmental cost of the product," Angel says. "Free trade is meant to be good because you're getting cheaper products from another country, but of course this never takes into account the environmental cost."

This point was illustrated earlier this year by Pablo Paster, a sustainability engineering consultant from San Francisco, who calculated that producing and transporting a one-litre bottle of Fijian water to the US consumed 6.74 kilograms of water and produced 250 grams of greenhouse gases. Paster says that getting that same bottle from Fiji to Sydney consumes six kilograms of water and produces 153 grams of greenhouse gases. [More]

Another argument for including external costs somehow into consumer prices.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My father would have flipped at bottled water. He use to tell us we didn't have to come into the house to get a drink, get it out of the HOSE.... today that might make him a bad father?

John Phipps said...

Mike:

Our tolerance for risk lowers as we become safer. My theory is our great-grandchildren won't leave the house without full body armor.