Leelanau Whippersnapper

Take a look at this article. Thought some of the statistics were pretty interesting.

Bottom line, the production of 31.2 billion liters of water for the U.S. bottled water market took roughly 17.6 million barrels of oil.

The simple break down is 3.4 megajoules of energy to produce a water bottle, cap and packaging with a barrel of oil producing about 6 thousand megajoules. Taking those numbers into account you arrive at 17.6 million barrels of oil, enough oil to run 1.5 million cars on U.S. roadways for an entire year.

I’ll be the first to admit that I do like bottled water but I like it only for the convenience of the bottle, the water is certainly nothing special.  It does not taste that much different from what comes out of my tap.  That said, especially in the summer I tend to recycle my bottled water.  I’ll fill it with filtered tap water multiple times and usually keep the bottle until I loose the cap (which happens surprisingly often).  It’s not much but it helps.

This county is all about convenience.  The nature of my job and my entire income depends entirely on America’s thirst for convenience items.  It is therefore very difficult for me to harp on people for buying them or using them.  Plastic bags and bottled water are only a small part of the “convenience market” but we as a society have to start changing our consumption behavior.  I think my generation will start but I don’t think any serious efforts will take place for many years to come.  I hope that someday, recycling will be mandatory EVERYWHERE and that I won’t live in a township like Cleveland Township in Leelanau County that voted down a recycling program becuase they didn’t want to pay $25 a year to support the program.  CHEAP FUCKING BASTARDS!  Oh well, I do what I can.