I'd rather have a bottle [of purified water] in front of me, than have to have a frontal lobotomy [from cancerous tap water] ...

PepsiCo just got "busted" for bottling treated/purified tap water and selling it for more money than you would pay for it directly out of your own faucet.

Well, normally I am all for the consumer's right for truth in labelling of food and food-type products, but this one is a bit ridiculous. I mean, they (Aquafina and Dasani, for example) already pretty much said that they were obtaining their water from the tap, only they used an acronym ("P.W.S." or public water source). Now, if they had said they got their water from some special spring somewhere, THAT would be misleading.

Groups such as "Think Outside the Bottle" obviously do not understand the problems with tap water, however. Public tap water can be very good and contaminant free at its source, but once it goes through all those miles of leaky public water pipes (that can be contaminated from adjacent sewer pipes or by contaminated ground water that seeps into the pipes), then into your house through some corroded (and likely lead, if it's an old house or building) pipes, it isn't as clean as when it's tested directly at the public water source. Every time I drink tap water, I tend to drink it as fast as I can and drink as little as possible, and while grimacing. A restaurant serving tap water to me is the same as if that restaurant served food that has pesticides, herbicides, and hormones in it. I generally only drink tap water at a restaurant when I'm feeling too cheap to pay $3+ for a bottle of water.

I understand that many, many thousands of used plastic water bottles litter cities, highways, and etc. across the globe, but the two things about that are: that it's better to have guaranteed clean water than potentially contaminated tap water, and the general consumer wants convenience, even at the cost of the environment and/or how much they have to pay for it, money wise.

If nothing else comes out of this "truth in labelling" occurrence, perhaps we will one day have our food labelled with country of origin, poisons used during production, whether it's a GM product, etc. Or, maybe what we should take away from Aquafina example is that PepsiCo doesn't have as many special-interest congressional lobbyists as Monsanto does!

On the amusing side, here's an extreme of 'truth in labelling': http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/enterprise/article640266.ece

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Here's some updates (8-20-2007) regarding bottled water issues:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/how-do-you-take-your-water

http://www.slate.com/id/2172541/nav/tap3

and on the plastic bottles themselves:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/5024076.html

http://www.thegreenguide.com/doc/108/plastic

Alternative fuels

Of course, for many reasons, we need to find an alternative to petroleum-based motor fuels, and as soon as possible (if not 30 years ago). And, it appears as if the United States is looking towards ethanol to be the official answer to the gasoline replacement question. My main concerns with using ethanol are that it will continue the BILLIONS of dollars in corn subsidies paid by the government (especially to the VERY large commercial farmers), and that protected and/or at-risk lands might be planted in corn in order to cash in even further on the production of corn (including more forests – and especially our national parks -- will be stripped to use the wood for ethanol production). Of course, both resources (corn and trees) are renewable resources, but you know that the large corporate farmers and the lumber companies (et al.) will eventually get greedy with our natural resources (much like the oil companies do now) and the American public will suffer for it. Plus, larger amounts of genetically-modified (GM) corn and etc. will be grown, and bioengineered yeast strains, which is bad for everyone and everything but the biotech companies. Right now, my only ‘pro’ regarding corn-based ethanol production is that the byproduct (the mash) can be used as a very efficient protein feed for livestock production or even human consumption (although ex- Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan feels that animals will go hungry once ethanol production increases!).

It is interesting to see President Bush visiting Brazil to talk about ethanol production; I’d like to see what comes of it. I understand Brazil is focusing on sugar cane-based ethanol (as is Cuba and a few other countries), but I also understand that virgin rainforests may suffer (much like our national parks may suffer) once land for sugar cane production becomes too valuable to let just “lie around” and be unproductive commercially. Anyway, President Bush seems to be focusing on corn stalks, wood chips from fast-growing trees, and switchgrass for the biomass needed for ethanol production; perhaps he feels that using the ears of corn or other edible biomass will result in people drinking the finished product?

Marty Bender, a scientist at the Land Institute in Kansas, conducted studies in the 1990s that documented that an alternative fuel source such as ethanol (as a large-scale and/or total replacement for gasoline) would be ecologically inefficient and agriculturally destructive in the long run because it may cause the cultivation of every possible acre of ground (including erosive lands that have the potential to stabilize our watersheds, for instance) in order to produce the biomass needed for the tremendous supply that would be required. Plus, it would most likely decrease the food supply (perhaps greatly) nationwide and worldwide if land is considered more valuable to use for the production of fuel biomass than for edible grains.

Of course, I don’t know the answer to what the most effective (in every way) “alternative” fuel is. Perhaps using methane or another form of composting gas (i.e. as a byproduct of composting) will work; maybe algae; perhaps hydrogen would be the most efficient; perhaps biodiesel is the key; maybe fuel cells; heck, possibly solar or thermal heat will work. I’m just not sure. It’d be nice to be able to use something that’s already serving or served its main purpose (in a byproduct or recycling-kinda way), such as landfill gas or sludge, or livestock manure, or urban sewage (perhaps biosolids, even with their heavy metals), or normally unrecyclable plastics or waxed cardboard. Again, I’m just not sure what the answer is. I do think that with so many vehicles on the road that utilize gasoline, something that those vehicles can use directly or be adapted to use would be most practical, at least in the short term (with the “short term” being perhaps 20 years or so). For instance, on my salary, I’m not going to buy a brand-new 2010 year-model truck that runs on hydrogen fuel cells, I’m going to find a way to adapt or convert my 1978 Ford F-150 to use something other than gasoline (I know, I know…perhaps I should have bought a diesel). Perhaps a combination of “alternative” fuels would be best overall, as then no singular resource will be wiped out, exploited by private business interests or governments, or overly affect the environment in a negative way, and people can tailor their fuel needs to their locality and to vehicular or home heating (again, or whatever) requirements. As Rachel Burton of Piedmont Biofuels (in Chatham County, N.C.), who seems to have coined the rather brilliant term ‘Slow Fuel’ (a modification of the term ‘Slow Food’), says, “we are believers in a micro-nodal model of energy production that insists that energy be harnessed where it is used … we have decided to include fuel in our 100 mile diet.”