Wednesday, August 24, 2011

These things are so unnecessary


The city water we get from our taps here in Port Angeles is of excellent quality.  This is also true of most municipalities in the USA.  

Our tap water is fine.  Really.

Eh, what the heck, a bottle of water is only what, fifty cents?  A buck, for one with a really pretty label - one that complements your Patagonia Polar Fleece?  But when you add up the cost of manufacturing the plastic, the burning of fossil fuels to deliver those heavy water bottles to market, the cost of us driving the empties out to the recycling bins out at the county landfill, you can easily see what an environmental disaster this stuff is.  And completely redundant.

Our tap water is fine.  Really.

When doing our housekeeping rounds here at the Downtown Hotel, we used to just chuck these empty water bottles in the trash; I mean what's an empty bottle or two?   This was before every person who checked in here decided they needed to import their own water supply.  Over time, as the bottles began to multiply, someone said, "You know, we really should be recycling these things." So, in a bit of recycling synergy, we started saving the plastic wrappers from the big bricks of toilet tissue rolls we buy and re-purposed them into plastic-bottle-recycling bags. And boy, they filled up fast. It's amazing how many plastic bottles get left behind, even in a tiny little hotel like ours.

Our tap water is fine.  Really.

If you're a real pure-water fanatic, you can buy a filtration bottle which is a whole heck of lot more portable than a case of (unknown quality) bottled water and doesn't cost much more.  Considering it will functionally replace 20 or so cases of bottled water, it's a bargain.

But if you're not especially picky, we stock our rooms with plain, lightweight plastic cups (which take up about 1/20 as much space in the recycle bin).  And we also provide perfectly good tap water.  

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