IRISH TIMES ARTICLE - 15th October 2009

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1015/1224256681750.html

A recent article by the Irish times suggests the madness of buying bottled water requires a levy on land fill waste plastic bottles similar to the plastic bag levy.  The cost per litre of bottled water is estimated at up to 10,000 times the cost of a similar litre of equally good tap water.

The article focuses on our collective inability to see common sense in using our local resources and instead shipping millions of gallons of bottled water 10's of thousands of miles around the globe also our fundamental weaknesses in "swallowing" any old marketing hype that is thrown at us with a very funny example listed here ...

"HERE’S A variation on the “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” gag. The question is how would you persuade people to knowingly drink water from a bottle that contained a dead spider? Penn Teller’s satirical US documentary series decided to find out by taking over a posh restaurant and producing a phoney “water menu” of expensive and exotic-sounding bottles – all of which had been filled from the tap using an old garden hose.

One choice was enticingly labelled L’eau Du Robinet (French for “tap water”), while the evening’s speciality, complete with an enormous dead arachnid, was labelled Amazon . The spider, they were told, was fresh from the rainforest, and added to its “medicinal qualities”. The upmarket diners not only tried it, they were willing to shell out $7 a bottle for this tainted tap water. With a little marketing to wash it down, some of us will literally swallow anything."

The humorous but eye opening insight in to bottled water by Penn and Teller (expletives used) ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPAjUvvnIc 

It seems time is up for the bottled water game.  We never used to have such an overload of bottled water on our supermarket shelves, the thought of buying water in a bottle in the 1970's at the price of petrol litre for litre would have been seen as madness and although we did not have such a range of modern domestic filtration systems available then as we do now, the ongoing use of bottled water is now being seen as an environmental catastrophe already in full flight.