EROEI.COM

Several French businessmen sat around the conference room table brainstorming their next big venture and at the same time making disparaging remarks about the Americans.

Finally one says, "Ah ha! I have it. The Americans are so stupid, I bet we could sell them water ..."

Or, how about this one.

A man and a woman are in a supermarket. They are standing in front of the shelves of bottled water.

The man wonders aloud, "Who would buy all this expensive Evian water anyway?"

"Evian," the woman says. "It's naive spelled backwards."

I really have nothing against bottled water other than it is an unnecessary expense and I don't buy the hype that it is any better than what comes out of the kitchen tap here in Great Falls.

I do buy two or three cases of bottled water every August when antelope season begins. Freeze the bottles and fill an ice chest or two with them and you have a place to chill out a freshly killed prairie goat or you can use it for drinking water. I mostly wind up drinking the water.

It isn't the idea of buying the water that is truly troublesome but more what happens to the plastic water bottles. Most times they just get tossed. That's baaaad.

The Earth Policy Institute reports that global consumption of bottled water reached in 2004 was up 57 percent from the amount consumed five years earlier. Even where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy.

"Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more," states an article at the Earth Policy Institute Web site. "At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline."

We here in America consume more bottled water than any other nation. We drank 26 billion liters in 2004, or just about an 8-ounce glass per person every day. Mexico is next, followed by China and Brazil.

See the data at: www.earthpolicy.org.

Developing countries are among the largest consumers and that is understandable. Plastic bottles are easier to come by than water pipelines.

Still, making and hauling all those plastic bottles burns massive quantities of fossil fuels.

Most of those bottles are made from crude oil derivatives.

The Earth Policy Institute says making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States becomes garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

Many of us associate bottled water with healthy living but there is no guarantee that bottled water is any healthier than tap water. In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water, says Earth Policy Institute.

Lots of time the only difference is that minerals have been added to the bottled water.

The French Senate advises people who drink bottled mineral water to change brands frequently because the added minerals are helpful in small amounts but may be dangerous in higher doses.

Is bottled water safer than tap water? In the United States, there are more regulations governing the quality of tap water than bottled water.

If you don't sip your H2O from one of those flimsy little single use bottles, you might be concerned about that Lexan container you carry around and refill from the office water cooler. One of the chemicals found in that kind of hard plastic has been linked to serious health risks.

Yeah, I know. Most of us are embarrassingly wasteful. How many times do you empty the trash everyday? Ever look at all that stuff you throw away?

Or, how about that little latte habit you've acquired lately. Buy one on the way to work every day for a month and you likely spend about $60 on frothed milk and ground beans.

If we lived as frugally as our parents or grandparents lived, we'd all be millionaires.