Did you ever stay in a hotel that places cards in your room that encourage you to reuse the towels and sheets during your stay? It gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling that your stay is helping the environment. You are saving water! When I walk around such a hotel and see an extraordinary number of lights on—and kept on all night—I wonder whether the hotel is really all that committed to saving the environment. Or is the hotel just trying to attract green customers?

In the 1980′s the term greenwashing was invented to refer to the practice of hotels that promoted linen reuse but did not also have other strategies for recycling. Green is good. Don’t get me wrong. But it is deceptive to spend more money promoting products as green than actually making sure the company is green or that the product itself is green.

That’s one of the reasons why I posted Is Bottled Water Green? some time back. Focusing on whether the bottle itself is better than some other bottle totally misses the point that bottling water is not an environmentally friendly practice to begin with.

Do you have any examples of greenwashing?

More than 70 municipalities, 6 school boards, and several campuses no long provide or sell bottled water in Canada. The Canadian Federation of Students, the Polaris Institute, and the Sierra Youth Coalition are sponsoring a Bottled Water Free Day on March 11, 2010. You don’t have to be Canadian to pledge to give up bottled water.

They say:

“The bottled water industry is less regulated than municipal water systems, consumes more energy and releases more harmful toxins into the environment than tap water.”

Their website provides many facts that you might want to check out, like this one:

“For soft drink giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, revenues from bottled water per unit outstrip soft drinks.”

Tap water costs 0.002 per gallon. If you filter it, the cost is about 0.25 gallon. Bottle water is about $10.66 gallon. Cost wise, giving it up is a no-brainer. If you are worried about drinking your tap water, test it. If it needs filtration, buy the proper filter.

You can get complete details on how to test your water and get the correct filter by reading Take Back the Tap Guide to Home Tap Water Filtration.

The City of Minneapolis produced 5 amusing videos to get the point across that the City of Lakes has great tap water. This is one of them. You can check out the rest on Tap Minneapolis. Then take the pledge and convert to tap water. Your story will appear on their website. What’s even better is that you’ll save a lot of money and help the environment.

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That’s the first sentence on the back label of Green Planet water. Where are bottles ending up? I took these photos a few weeks ago, when I was hiking in the rainforest of Panama, near Gamboa.

How many reusable water bottles do you find on the ground? I’ve never found any. People tend to hang onto those. Bottled water promotes carelessness. No message on any bottle will change that.

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Yes, these look like they are soda bottles. The issue is the same for soda (colored, sweetened tap water) as it is for plain bottled water and carbonated bottled water.

No.

Yet the marketeers of bottled water companies are working hard to convince you that drinking it actually helps the environment. Save your money and don’t fall for it.

Green Planet is one of the more recent bottled water vendors on the market. I’ll analyze the hype on the bottle:

Green Planet: The environmentally friendly bottle.
Digital Rabbit: It burns great because it was made from plants, not oil. They still have to use up energy to fabricate the bottle, make the inks, and so on. The most environmentally friendly container is a reusable one, like a glass.

Green Planet: Quench your thirst and your desire to help the environment.
Digital Rabbit: You can just as easily quench your thirst by turning on your own tap. Then take the money your were going to spend on the bottled water and donate it to a true environmental cause.

Green Planet: Pure Handcrafted Water.
Digital Rabbit: What does that mean? Did someone take hydrogen and mix it with oxygen? I think not. This is pure B.S. I described my water system a few days ago. There is nothing to “handcrafted water.” Turn on the pump, extract the water from the ground. It probably doesn’t even need treatment.

Green Planet: By choosing our water you’re helping reduce global warming, carbon emissions and our dependency on oil.
Digital Rabbit: Pure B.S. You are actually contributing to global climate change and increasing dependency on oil. The bottle takes energy to manufacture. The bottled water takes gasoline to transport. (Water is heavy, too.) Manufacturing and transportation emit carbon.

My advice. Drink tap water.

There are many things that upset the water balance, like irrigating dry areas for crops. But bottled water is one completely avoidable imbalance. It’s a waste of energy. It’s a waste of money. It’s unfair to the local communities that rely on the water table.

Let’s take a look at a balanced water system and then see how to imbalance it with bottled water. I’ll use my water system (which I described yesterday) as an example.

First take a look at the soil and ground water layers in this USGS diagram. The “unsaturated zone” has small empty spaces between the grains of dirt that are filled with air or water. But because it’s all mixed in together, it is impossible to pump any water out. Plants do a pretty good job extracting water from this layer with their roots.

If you go down deep enough, you arrive at the saturated zone where water dominates. I actually have two wells on my property. One is an Artesian well, where the ground water is really near the surface. It’s not trapped below like what you see in the diagram. The other well is tapping into ground water similar to what you see in the image.

The ground water gets refilled by water seeping down through the layers, although in some cases there could be an underground river recharging the ground water. In a dry place like parts of Texas, it could take centuries to refill. In wet areas, like the Panama canal zone that I just visited, ground water will get replenished fast. I have no idea how long it takes for my ground water to replenish.

Not all rainwater makes it back to the groundwater layer. As you might imagine, evaporation and plants use up a bit.

After I extract the water from the ground, it either gets drunk, used to wash something (dishes or me or laundry), or flushes a toilet. Used water goes into a septic tank or directly on the ground. In either case, it ends up seeping into the ground and some of it will end up recharging the ground water. The main point is that this is a balanced system. Whatever I takes stays right on the property.

If I were an entrepreneur, I might look at my 10,000 gallon water tank as a money maker. That comes out to 40,000 16 oz bottles. At a conservative $1 a bottle, even if costs were 0.50 to produce, I can make $20,000 a tank. I’m told that the flow rate from my groundwater is pretty good. I haven’t done the math, but I do know I can pump quite a bit of water, quite fast out of the ground in my area. Pure, clean, mountain water.

What would happen if I did that?

As soon as the water gets transported off property, I lose that amazing balanced system I had going. What’s more, I’m using gasoline to bring the water to someone who is too lazy to fill their own reusable bottle. I’m also sucking down the same groundwater that my neighbors are tapping into. Oh yeah, then there is the energy I have to expend to fabricate the bottles, the gasoline to bring them to my bottling plant, and the inevitable waste the bottle creates.

Bottled water companies like to claim how environmentally responsible they are by using recyclable bottles, using thinner plastic, reclaiming water used in processing, and so on. (See How Can Bottled Water Be Green?) So think about the following the next time your are compelled to purchase bottled water:

After Nestle rolled into McCloud, California to extract water (they have a 100 year contract), 250-300 trucks per day started rolling into town (24/7/365), McCloud has noise and air pollution now that they never had before. When you drink bottled water, think of McCloud. If the water in the bottle isn’t coming from McCloud, it’s coming from some other small town’s aquifer—like Chaffee County, Colorado or Fryeburg, Maine or Mecosta County, Michigan.

Why don’t you just buy a water bottle, fill it with water from your own tap, and carry that bottle with you? Then you can drink up and know that you are not causing grief for some small town.

See: Stop Nestle’s Waters.

Watergeeks is a business that sells water bottles, water filters, and other products aimed at helping alleviate the global water crisis. Their main products are personal water bottles. Their mission is to eliminate the waste of bottles used for bottled water. Many people think that because bottled water bottles are recyclable, that the bottles actually get recycled. But of the 10 billion bottles of water sold each year, only 10% are recycled. The other 9 billion bottles end up in landfills. Watch this video to get an idea of how many bottles that is. Then, get yourself a personal water bottle, fill it with tap water, and stop buying bottled water. Watergeeks isn’t the only place that sells good personal water bottles, but they do have an interesting website with lots of facts about water, the world water crisis, contamination, and more.

Remember the day when you could quench your thirst instead of getting hydrated? Does Aquafina mean the end of water as we know it? Does the deer on the label of Deer Park water pee in the water before it’s bottled? Lewis Black expounds on these and other water-related questions. (Note: Explicit language.)