Commentary

I was at a meeting of a group of environmental activists recently that was held in a community meeting room at a large grocery store.  The meeting was going to last a couple of hours and I was thirsty so I decided to get a drink from the store.  Soda, diet soda and juices are too sweet for my taste.  So in spite of their checkered environmental reputation, I bought a bottle of water.

Many people in the meeting were drinking fruit juice and that got me thinking.  Is a plastic bottle of fruit juice that much of an environmental improvement?  Sure, the juice probably didn’t come from Fiji or France but the fruit may have come from Australia or Chile.  The bottled water was put through an energy intensive filtering process but the fruit juice probably needed to be pasteurized, another energy
intensive process.  Furthermore, the fruit needed fertilizer, pesticides, etc. and (hopefully) the water did not.

I am not a beveridge sustainability expert but it seems to me that the criticism of bottled water comes from comparing it to tap water.  Tap water is usually free and it is local and therefore is the ultimate green drink.  But why are we less critical of fruit juices and soda?  Are the people who decide to stop buying bottled water switching to bottled juice or soda?  Or energy drinks?  And is that better for the environment?