I’ve lived nearly all my life living in the Bay Area, a region with a climate ideally suited for humans. The past five years I have been living in San Francisco, basically the coolest and among the wettest parts of the Bay Area. Surrounded by (salt) water on three sides, cooled by the marine layer on most mornings, and just as importantly served by one of the most pristine 
water sources in the world: the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, filled by the melting snows of the Sierra Nevada.
So in this land of natural coolness, fog, and pristine water, I get really annoyed when I see people drinking out of disposable water bottles. I cannot avoid pondering the selfish and thoughtless waste of resources that that overpriced container of shitty water represents. From the oil used to make the bottle, for the fuel used by the shipping company to drive the full bottles from some bottling plant -Â one heated and cooled with fossil fuel – to the likelihood that that bottle will end up either in a landfill or as part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to the very likely possibility that the water in said bottle contains more contaminants than your local water faucet, it all just reeks of waste and boorishness.
Of course, just a couple of years ago I, too, was frequently consuming water from a plastic bottle. And of course there are occasions when it really is a good way to get yourself water. But for the corporate shindigs, or the college student or working mother who grabs one from the fridge, I have no patience. Need to carry water with you? How about a reusable container?
It is true that each individual act of conservation by not using disposable plastic water bottles is in itself trivial. But with $10 billion spent on it yearly in the US alone, we need every single one of those trivial acts.
I know that drinking water out of 60-year-old water pipes can seem like an unhealthy prospect. But for those of us who care about our health, doesn’t it make more sense to by a good quality water filter for your home than to add to global warming, just for a glass of tasty water?
