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Times Food Critic Against Bottled Water

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Finally! A relevant person when it come to taste, a food critic from The Times, London, is against bottled water

Written by Claus

January 15th, 2007 at 2:25 pm

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Vancouver Out of (Bottled) Water

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What do you do, if you’re supposed to boil (and cool) all tap water that you want to drink? You buy bottled water. What happens if 2 million people want bottled water? Demand gets bigger than supply. I guess, before it can get more expensive, stores run out of bottles. Run out of bottles of water, milk, juice, everything. No more coffee either. Starbucks shot their coffee brewing business pretty much down, and everybody else followed suit. Is this not a clear sign for how important drinking water is? Is this not a clear sign how much people are willing to pay? Does this mean that companies that sell one liter of drinking water for ten dollars are doing the right thing? And does this mean that drinking water coming out of the tap is too cheap? Hotels announce that they put extra bottled water into rooms so their customers can use that for brewing their coffee. Where do those hotels get those bottles from? What do people do who can’t go to supermarkets to get bottled water (because they’re ill or have to work or are too poor)? I guess in crises like this the necessity of drinking water for every human being becomes crucially visible. All these sort of philosophical questions “boil down” to the one question if drinking water is a public good or not, with all its consequences.

Leaving the philosophical question, turning to a practical one: Why is all this happening? Vancouver relies entirely on surface water for its drinking water supply. This surface water (rivers) is collected in reservoirs, and from there transported in pipelines directly into the distribution system. Usually, this is pretty nice in Vancouver, because the rivers start in the mountains with lots of snow-melt water. So usually, the quality is good and the water feels “fresh”. In the last couple of days, it rained a lot, the rain triggering mudslides into the reservoirs where the water is being collected. The material of those mudslides is often very fine, so the particles are small, and do not settle down in the reservoir, but stay in the water and hence might get transported through the pipes and appear at the tap. If those particles are inorganic and really small, this is not a problem. However, if organic, or viruses or bacteria are coming with / are attached to the particles, this might lead to health problems. It is hard to predict if this happens and to what extent. So this boiling water advisory is a cautionary measure. First it was issued on thursday for about 2 million people, and since friday afternoon it is still valid for about 700,000 people

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Written by Claus

November 18th, 2006 at 2:20 pm

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