Bottled water is not safer, or better tasting, or even more convenient, than tap water; it’s certainly not cheaper, and it generates massive amounts of needless waste.

We can  work collectively to end bottled water use in our schools and campuses, in our workplaces, and in our local, state and federal governments.

There are two parts to the problem of bottled water: the water, and the bottle. n the intro to Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water (2010), Peter Gleick writes, “every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy and open up a plastic bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day in the United States, a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day. More than thirty billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars.”

 It is no exaggeration to say that, throughout the world, the poorest people are forced to live in, on, and from the waste produced by the rest of us. Especially in the developing world (where, as Annie explains, much of our “recycling” goes), informal collecting and sorting of waste provides a livelihood for large numbers of the urban poor, especially women and children. The World Bank estimates that 1 percent of the urban population in developing countries earns a living through this work.

In the U.S. and Canada, for the most part, we have strong, safe public water systems. But in much of the world, this is not the case. This doesn’t mean that in these countries bottled water is the solution, because it’s not. It means we need ever-increasing efforts to understand the root causes of the world’s drinking water crisis, and efforts to beat the crisis that are based in human rights, care for the environment, and the common good.