Plastic rant

Again . . .
A couple of posts back I'd gone on about the overuse of plastic, mainly in the form of containers in the home. This is a following rant about water bottles and the encouragement to buy them constantly by the manufacturers - not exactly the right word . . . the gatherers/ robbers? of water itself. Actually, do Evian/Perrier/Buxton, etc, etc, have nature's go-ahead to take water, encase it in plastic and sell it to us? Anyway, they do it, and we buy it - a million bottles a minute as a rough estimate (Guardian), bought and discarded.
On a long, cross-city trip yesterday, I decided not to buy a bottle, or even carry a re-used bottle. It was fine. I drank a mug of water, topped up with another in a café along with a cup of tea, peed on the train (in the correct place) and arrived hours later at my destination perfectly hydrated - wee still the right colour and no headache. Sorry for the bodily info, but I do wonder if we all get so bludgeoned with info about fluid intake that it's become a sort of mania - fuelled by the bottled water companies.
Yes, it's vital to drink enough unflavoured and unsweetened water but most (unless you are in somewhere that doesn't have the privilege of good sewage systems) tap water is perfectly good, more than good. We are so bloody lucky to be able to turn on a tap and drink.
Take a bottle of tap water with you - a small glass one, or a fancy little designer bottle for that purpose; resist the urge to buy another small plastic bottle with a special 'feeding stopper'. There's something slightly repulsive about those, to my mind - an ever-ready 'teat' to suck on, made of even thicker plastic.



So, now we are brain-washed into feeling fresh mountain water must be available at every second of the day, what about other ways of companies providing it while still making money?
How about . . . large, (preferably, metal) water containers - a bit like the office ones only bigger, stationed in shops, in stations, everywhere that we normally buy bottles. You could pay, say ten pence for a paper cone of water, throw it in the recycling box and go on your way, happily re-hydrated and free of to carrying anything extra. Companies could jostle/bid/share (ha-ha) for who was positioned where; there'd be less ferrying water about, less plastic at every step, less waste, less space taken up in shops . . . simple! Better still, would be the re-introduction of free water fountains everywhere but then the massive bottled water industry would squirt to a gradual halt - not going to happen. But maybe it has to along with so many other huge changes we need to make to halt the environmental mess we are already in.

                                                

Things-phobia

I seem to be suffering from an increasing sense of panic every time I walk into a supermarket. I try to avoid them but for certain things like dog biscuit and bulk-buy tins of tomatoes and 'fosse-septique (cess-pit) cleaners they are useful.
We buy most of our stuff in a small co-op organic shop down the road - yes, it's more expensive, but . . . it isn't, as the nature of shopping there compared with the grocery-sheds is utterly different. I go in and buy milk, veg, flour etc, and don't get distracted by anything else NEW, or on special offer, or 'oo, that looks nice, maybe we should try it, and we could use a couple of new mugs, and, well, I suppose we could have a bottle of fizz, and maybe a cake, and some ice-cream, and the towels are looking a bit sad; look, they've got green ones in, those would look good in the bathroom . . . STOP! what did we come in for? Dog biscuit and shoe polish.' Yes.
The worst aspect of the sheds/shopping cathedrals is the amount of plastic everywhere, especially in the home-care and toiletries sections. What do we really need for both cleaning ourselves and our dwellings? Not much. Some soap, a basic shampoo and a clothes wash/washing-up substance.
This picture is of a locally made product called VAM, made of vinegar, herbs and water. It's brilliant; I wash surfaces, floors, showers, etc, with it, and if you want some heftier cleaning - add bicarb of soda. Job done, and you can take the bottle back and refill it.




We NEED more of these products, and more ways of re-using containers - for everything. It's mind-numbingly terrifying to read about the amount of plastic that ends up each day in our oceans. I've started taking a bottle of TAP water out in preference to buying yet another small individual bottle of water shipped from hundreds of miles away - like Scottish spring water in our local French airport - uh?
We are mostly all blessed with clean drinking water and it's just advertising hype that keeps the pressure on to buy 'pure mountain' water.
Apparently, more than 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away to end up in landfill and incinerators every day . . .

Next stop Mars?

It could be the next planet ready to be covered in a layer of plastic once we've done with this one . . .

Making my way back home, I stopped in Liverpool Street station to buy a bottle of water, having forgotten my own one to refill (tut-tut). Of course, if you listen to all the stuff telling you that you should be drinking your own body weight (actually, possibly a litre, I forget) in pure, clear, fresh water each day, by the time you have spent three hours on a train and have only consumed a creosote-like paper cup of tea, the alarm bells start ringing . . . quick find water.
Delice de France, Pret a manger, etc, only had large bottles and I just wanted a glug as I wished to avoid fighting my way past the aircraft drinks trolley to the loo. Boots had bottles of all sizes including this tiny one (below) containing water from a famous source situated in a French mountain range. Why is this? - I mean, why am I buying water from under a hill in central France when Buxton or Malvern are considerably nearer, and actually all I wanted was a slurp of tap water - something we are lucky enough to have!

                                         

This bottle holds 33cl. Including its very thick 'danger, do not drink' style flip-cap I would think it is constructed of enough plastic to make about, I don't know, twenty syringes? or a vital part of a solar panel? - anyway, something else plastic is actually vital for.
I'm looking around at this one train carriage. The guy opposite me has a bottle - bigger and from some unsuspecting mountain in Scotland (better); the woman next to him is sipping every now and again from a green bottle - that one from Italy with a beautiful name - in fact that's a statement in itself, I suppose: my choice of water.
So . . . why can't we have THIS (bearing in mind I know nothing of economics, market strategies or how this might be realised) - Water fountains - just tap water, like in the olden days before water became fashionable.
And if you need to buy mineral water, commercial fountains, along the lines of those giant upside down office bottles. The companies providing the fountains and Boots or whoever could still rake in their profits, we could have paper cups and then throw them into recycling bins. Fifty pence for a small cup? True we wouldn't have that 'mouth-to-breast' sort of continual comfort sipping but I think we could all cope.
I read the other day the US alone gets through something like 50 million plastic water bottles every day - gets through - and NOT recycled.
So, why can't we stop this? Too much money to be made from H2O; too much mania about 'fresh' pure and straight from the source; too much advertising revenue and not enough willpower or foresight from governments, I imagine.
No more plastic bottles except where really needed - a relatively small thing to implement, compared to mass invasion of another country or space exploration?