I'd like to discuss a problem I think is plaguing a lot of people, including my roommate who is smart but ill-informed and stubborn. That problem is bottled water.

People who drink bottled water in Manhattan piece me off for a variety of reasons. Let's go through some typical reasons why people drink bottled water and spend upwards of three dollars per bottle when they could get cool, clean, tasty water from our apartment tap.

1. It tastes better: this is the biggest crock of absolute Bullshit I've ever heard. It is also one of the main reasons my roommate spends his stock options and life savings on bottles and bottles and more bottles of Fiji water. He claims it simply tastes better than what comes out of our tap. I told him he's completely full of shit and decided to have a little taste test to prove it. I brought out two identical cops, one with water from our tap and one with water from the Fiji bottle he was drinking from. Indeed, he was able to tell very quickly which was which, but this doesn't address a fundamental question -- which one actually tastes better (and what I mean better I don't mean noticeably different, I mean noticeably better). The other thing my spontaneous taste test did not incorporate was multiple types of water and multiple double-blind tastings. I decided that proving my roommate is an idiot did not require this much effort. Nevertheless, he claims that Fiji water doesn't have the metallic taste that New York City water has. The whole concept that one water could taste so much better than another water is absolute nonsense to me. We are not talking about the difference between Pepsi and Coke or two bottles of wine or two bottles of beer. We are talking about two substances that are identical in their chemical makeup. They don't contain any sweetener, no differences in flavor, nothing. It's just water. The only thing that gives it a different flavor is perhaps a cocktail of minerals and other natural contaminants in the water, most of which I'm assuming you can't even taste -- like arsenic. I tasted the two glasses of water in my blind taste test and as soon as I walked out of the kitchen I pretty much forgot which was which.
2. Cost: the other thing that really pisses me off about bottled water is that once an imbecile like my roommate Zach becomes convinced that bottled water is somehow better for him, or taste year than our tap water, he feels it is a good investment to be spending two dollars per 1 L bottle. After one week of drinking water, my costs of drinking gallons of tap water is zero while his gets up to $15-$20. After a month, mine is still zero while his is $60-$80. And after a year of this nonsense, the grand total of my water drinking comes to a whopping zero while his approaches $750. Thank you Zak for contributing to this multibillion-dollar bullshit industry.
3. It's cleaner: Zacks other brilliant argument for why he wastes tons of money on bottled Bullshit is that the pipes that bottle the water in Fiji are somehow cleaner than the pipes that deliver our water in New York City. I won't argue that our pipes are older, but I would argue against this notion of assuming that because they are older they must somehow also be dirtier. In fact, New York City water is among the cleanest in the world and tastiest according to some study that I'm not going to quote but that I remember reading somewhere in amNY or perhaps on the Internet. And we all know the Internet is full of hard data and bulletproof facts. In any event, we decided to look up just how clean Fiji water is. Apparently Fiji ran an ad recently comparing their water to Cleveland's water and implying in a snide way that Cleveland's water was inferior. Of course the people who oversee Cleveland's water supply took this as an insult and decided to do a little water testing themselves, comparing the two waters for contaminants and quality. What they found was that on the score of arsenic, Cleveland's water came up with 0 µg while Fiji came up with 6 µg of arsenic. Granted, the EPA allows up to 10 µg of arsenic in drinking water, but the point remains, Fiji is a bunch of crap. Now I'm not going to argue that some bottled waters are better for you than some tap water -- just go and watch "a civil action" and you may think twice about drinking what comes out of your faucet. But we are just discussing New York City tap water, which is among the best tasting and healthiest water in the world. And what pisses me off the most is this blind assumption that water coming through old pipes is somehow less safe than water Artesia and water in Fiji that is going through some water filtration system and bottling process. Our water has to be safe enough for 8 million people to drink, unfiltered, straight from the tap. Bottled water just has to be safe enough to pass an FDA test. I may be making this up, but who gives a shit, but I believe New York City water has to meet more standards than bottled water does.
4. Energy and resource consumption in distribution: even if all of the above arguments are Bullshit, one major argument still stands up to the challenge of bottled water. The distribution system. Not only is water either free or extremely cheap in most homes in the United States, but remember there is a fantastic delivery system that has been built to give us the water in the most convenient way possible. I wish there were distribution systems like that for Pepsi or for bacon. That would be really cool. Just go to my faucet and choose a type of food and out it comes on to my plate. Unfortunately, this technology doesn't exist just yet. but bottled water is a commodity just like bacon or Pepsi, and therefore needs to be distributed as such -- through a complex system of trucks, ships, airplanes, and of course packaging.

Let's take a look at the trip a single 1 L bottle of Fiji water needs to take in order to get to my stupid roommate's lips. And while we're looking at this trip, let's consider all of the energy (in the form of petroleum) and resources necessary to make that trip.

It starts in the cool, clear Artesia in waters of Fiji. I don't know if it's a mountain, a river, or a glacier, but who the fuck cares. It's crystal clear and really clean and it tastes great, so it's worth the trip.

The water gets bottled into a 1 L plastic bottle. That plastic bottle was manufactured in a large factory that has to use some amount of energy and oil to create that plastic and mold it into that bottle. But let's just assume that is a negligible amount of energy. Assuming the actual bottling of the water is also a negligible amount of energy, which it obviously is not because the Fiji water bottling plant is not a perpetual motion machine. But let's just assume that it is.

Okay, so now we have a nice, smooth bottle of refreshing Fiji water. Now we need to somehow get it to my roommate here in New York City. It gets loaded up on a huge vessel that takes a journey across the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. I'm not sure which. Fiji is a bunch of islands right next to Australia, so it's really fucking far away, and I'm guessing you can take either the Pacific or the Atlantic oceans to get to America. In either route you are literally going halfway across the globe. This requires an insanely large amount of diesel fuel to power one of those huge ships with large cargo areas that hold several hundred thousand bottles of this Fiji goodness. I am making a blind assumption here, but it's probably pretty close, that this trip accounts for perhaps half of the base cost of that bottle of water. The bottle of water costs about two dollars in a store in New York. I'm assuming that most of that base cost can be attributed to fuel, so let's make this interesting and fill our water bottle up not with water, but with good old-fashioned diesel fuel.

After our huge trip across the world, we've filled up our water bottle about half way with fuel, approximately one dollar in associated costs. Now the Fiji boat has arrived, but we can't praise the Fiji gods just yet and bathe in their watery goodness. No, that vessel is still stuck in a port somewhere on the East Coast. Its cargo must be unloaded (labor) and packed into a truck to be shipped across the country. Keep in mind, trucks have the worst mileage of any vehicle on the road. Far worse than any SUV or Hummer, trucks achieve a whopping two or 3 miles per gallon. In fact, heavy trucks like the 18 wheelers you typically see on the highway account for a third of all of the carbon dioxide emissions from all vehicles in the US.

So now our bottle of Fiji water, still untouched by men, has in its journey to get to our mouths helped to contaminate the oceans it traveled on, and the air it drove through. Our Fiji truck finally makes it to New York City, probably burning several hundred gallons of fuel in the process. For every 1 gallon of fuel burned there is an associated 6 pounds of carbon dioxide that is emitted -- for diesel fuel. But even if there was no global warming (which would be devastating to the Fiji Islands), trucks are emitting enormous amounts of pollutants into the air we breathe, causing all kinds of medical problems like asthma.

The Fiji truck pulls up in front of our apartment to drop off a shipment of bottles. It sits, idling for 30 minutes while the diligent Fiji workers unload. During this entire process of driving a truck, we've accounted for another $.50 or so that we had to pay for fuel. Fill that bottle up another quarter of the way.

Certainly what New York City needs more of is a bunch of fucking trucks driving through our already cramped streets, clogging our already dirty lungs with even more of their Bullshit pollution. New York City already has an air quality problem, the last thing we need is a bunch of idling trucks near my fucking apartment.

In the meantime, my stupid roommate believes that it is healthier and safer for him to drink this water. Of course, by drinking this water he is encouraging the Fiji jackasses to bottle more water, and ship more bottles, and idle more of their fucking trucks directly in front of my god damn apartment so that I can come downstairs and breathe in their dirty air and fumes.

In the long-run, the little harm that some of the contaminants in the New York City water supply might do to an unsuspecting regular drinker of water, is infinitely less harmful than the impact that a single bottle of Fiji water had on the environment and people it came in contact with.

So the final cost of the bottle of water is $1.50, for 1 L. My final bill may not be free exactly, but it certainly doesn't require any of the energy necessary to transport that 1 L of water to my glass. And on top of that, I'm not filling up the landfill with non-biodegradable plastics that will be there for a thousand years.

Oh and one last thing. My roommate smokes half a pack a day. Maybe if he focused more on not inhaling carcinogens and less on drinking cleaner water, he’d be healthier.