Survey: Tap or Bottled Water at Work?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 10. 1.08
Where I live, they now deliver water in glass jugs for the water coolers at work. It weighs forty pounds, costs twelve bucks, delivered sixty miles to a city with perfectly good drinking water that is too cheap to meter. In the staff lounge at the University where I teach, I can barely hang up my coat because the closet is full of ten empty polycarbonate jugs. How did it come to this?
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Before our office moved we had a water cooler in our break room. Now our office is smaller with no break room so the manager decided to go with bottled water just because he didn't want the water cooler to be visible. It annoys me to no end because there are 5 people (not including me) who drink at least 2 bottles a day. All that waste! A water cooler was better than millions of little plastic bottles. I try to drink from water fountains but I'll never convince the people in my office to do that.
well, drinking bottled water always beats other beverages, e.g. beer, which needs 38l of water just to make one liter beer, the only question is... is making beer really a waste? ;)
Just like at home, my office has filtered tap water (at work, through our coffeemaker... at home, through the fridge). I always use the filtered water, in my own reusable cup, though not strictly for the filtering... I prefer it because it is chilled.
Local water may be plenty clean (especially in the U.S.), but in older buildings, old plumbing might not provide the cleanest of water. I was never fool enough to buy into the bottled water craze, but filters are always great.
The good news is that virtually everyone at work had their own cooler cup for water. The bad news is that they refilled it at "cooler" stations, from large bottled water, even though water is also available at fountains WITH refill taps. I believe people's habits are "slowly" changing though.
We have the water cooler, but for a very good reason. I work at a waste water treatment plant. A few years ago a backflow preventer in the plant failed, and most of the employees fell ill.
As one that holds a license in public water treatment I like to make some intelligent remarks. Bottled water is one of the great scams of the century. The standards for it are the same as all water that comes from taps in this country. .25ppm of chlorine of residual chlorine is required at the tap to prevent biological activity. The city I live in treats their water with ozone and only adds .5 ppm choride after treatment to meet the standards as some is lost in distribution from oxidation of residual organics. Our water is as good as it gets. Save your money.
Distilled water or reverse osmosis water is actually very unhealthy. Man evolved drinking water that is heavily latten with minerals. As much as 40% of our calcium uptake was from water. Drinking water absent of minerals will cause your body to leach these mineral from your bones. Older woman drinking these mineraless waters are highly prone to osteoperosis.
Great comment Paul! :)
OMG! People buy bottles of filtered water for their water coolers!? That is the ultimate in laziness and craziness. I am speechless.
Yeah we got water coolers but they are refilled by a filtered tap.